Before I Forget

New Beginnings

"It's going to be fine," Dad said and gave Sky an encouraging smile.

Sky glanced at the school and hugged her backpack tighter against her chest. West Valley High, said the letters on the wall, and Sky's stomach knitted on a tight knot that climbed up her throat and threatened to choke her.

"That's what you said the last time, and look what happened." She muttered, turning her eyes back at Dad, who sat in the driver's seat, his long fingers resting calmly on the steering wheel.

He let out a sigh, his smile faltered. "You could always stay home for another week?"

Sky replied with a shrug. There was nothing new in that proposition - it was what the doctors had suggested too because Sky still wasn't fully healed. But the truth was that no one knew when - if ever - she would be fully healed, and she was sick and tired of staying home, sick and tired of staring at the boring walls of her room all day long while all her friends, and her boyfriend, were at school. It was now a full month since the accident, and Sky's patience had worn paper thin.

But now, looking at the school building through the window of the car, her determination faltered. There was an appeal to the idea that she could ask Dad to just drive her back home. She knew she couldn't do that, though - no matter how scared and nervous she was. She had promised to live, and staying home forever because you were afraid, was not living. Kat would tell her to get her shit together already.

"No, I'm gonna have to do this sooner or later," Sky said and gathered enough strength and courage to give Dad a smile, no matter how fake. "You're right. I'm sure it's gonna be fine."

"That's my girl," Dad flashed her a warm smile. "But just in case something happens—"

"I know. I'll give you a call."

"And I'll pick you up."

Dad's encouraging words lingered with Sky when she stepped out of the car, and they made her feel stronger than she was, more ready than she was. But as Dad steered away and Sky was left standing alone on the sidewalk, the undesired thoughts and fears began to creep back on her like vines, trapping her feet to the ground so that she couldn't move.

Entering the school after everything that had happened... She had too much experience of that for one lifetime. The memories swarmed her mind in one, anxious heartbeat.

The worst of them hit her the hardest, taking her breath away as if a wrecking ball had smashed her lungs in - the day when she had tried to go back to school after Kat had died. She would never forget how it had felt - to be the one everyone was staring at, to hear the hushed whispers behind her back. No one had dared to say it to her face, but Sky had known it nevertheless, from the anonymous messages she had gotten - that they all thought it was her fault. That if she hadn't been such a slut, Matt never would have done what he did, and it was her fault that the captain of the football team was in prison, the golden boy who could do no wrong, the homecoming King, the most popular guy in the whole fucking school. So of course it was all Sky's fault, she had been a slut who had broken his heart and he had just been desperate, the gunshot probably just an accident, Sky had ruined everything for him, and that's why they all hated her. If only Kat had been there by her side, she could have taken all that, all the whispering and snickering and the mean messages she had gotten because it didn't matter that they had all hated her - no one could have hated her more than she already hated herself, after all. But Kat's absence had been like an open wound in her heart, bleeding out her soul, and that first day back at school when walking to the cafeteria - see you at lunch, bitch - lol, I hope they have pizza - seeing the spot where Kat had bled to death, where she could still smell the disinfectant they had used to scrub Kat's blood off the floor tiles, Sky had fallen into a pit of dark despair and suffered her first PTSD episode - and so it had become her last day at that school too.