She Who Cheated Life

At the end of Howlter Lane stood a charming two-storey house painted in plain shades of cream; a lawn that was once vibrantly green now lay dried-out, brown, and unkept in front of the house. It went unsaid that there were no flowers there, although once upon a time there had been the most beautiful bed of luridly colored forget-me-nots in that very yard. Now, however, the house remained neglected and had wasted away in a year's time, with its garden gate hanging off its hinges and its front door covered in chipped paint. 

Nevertheless, past the white picket fence surrounding the lot, the house welcomed friends and family alike from the front door to a wide foyer, and upon the cream-colored walls were old photographs of smiling faces who were so obviously loved. The floor was an old-fashioned and dingy parquet with a blend of deep burgundy-browns, while the walls that stretched to the ceiling away from the entrance hall were enveloped with seafoam-green wallpaper that was steadily peeling from the drywall. 

Up the stairs, past more mounted pictures in tarnished frames and the polished wooden banister, through the hallway lined with even more grinning pictures, was a bedroom where Killian Knight was snoring loudly. Having finally fallen asleep, she was sitting in a spindle-legged chair beside her bedroom window for the best part of an hour, staring out at the quickly darkening street, one side of her face pressed against the cold surface of the windowpane, her mouth wide open. Her breath was fogging up the misty glass, and the orange glare resonating from the old-timey street lamps outside lining Howlter Lane painted her pale face in an artificial light that gave her a ghostly look beneath her shock of unkempt fiery red hair.

The room was strewn with a surprising amount of trash and discarded clothing lying on the floor; next to a pair of particularly worn-out trainers was a mess of chip wrappers and empty soda bottles. On the bed were a number of thick novels balanced haphazardly on top of a heap of unworn sweaters and coats, and on the desk sat a mess of polaroid pictures bathed in a puddle of light emitted from a nearby lamp. Some of these polaroids were of an older man and woman, whose hair was as flaming red as that of Killian's; smile lines littered their aged faces, but these wrinkles told stories of glee, of pain, of loving memories they've formed with their only daughter, who looked just like her mother but whose eyes were that of her father's. 

Most of the polaroids, however, were of three beaming faces: One was of medium height and build and had fair skin, gray eyes, and mousy brown hair; the other had a slightly tanned complexion, which was likely due to his outdoor misadventures, glaringly yellow-orange eyes, and dark hair that curled around the edges to contrast the brightness of his orbs — and in the middle of the two boys was Killian Knight, whose sweeping red locks always stuck out like a sore thumb.

Killian grunted in her sleep, and her face slid down the window an inch or two, but she did not wake up. There was nothing but silence in the room, only to be broken rhythmically by the alarm clock that ticked loudly on the sill. Beside it was a cellphone wrapped in a bejeweled orange casing that was left open, showing a group text between the three friends:

Avery Delacroix: What time are we coming over on Saturday?

Finnick Oleksiy: Dunno. Mrs. Knight said around five, I think.

Killian had read and reread these texts so often the past three days that she could recite them word for word. It had been so long since Avery and Finnick had come round her house; she didn't know exactly why the two had stop coming; it happened rather abruptly — one school day, when the final bell rang, they didn't walk home with her to kill an hour or two, chatting, goofing around, doing homework, and just hanging out at her bedroom, as they always did. That's when it all began; since then, she always had the vague feeling she was being edged out of their trio. Anytime she'd come up to them during recess or lunch (they had different class schedules), they would barely acknowledge her presence, and it felt to her as though she was being iced out.