thunderstruck - zac efron and vanessa hudgens

chapter 2 - zac

[tw: mentions of death, discussion of corpses, sexual harassment but not from the main characters]

Our school is pretty boring on the inside. The walls are boring, the floors are boring, and the general atmosphere is boring. For an interior designer, or a photographer, or someone who seeks non-boring hallways, these would be awful to walk through. But my only goal right now is to think, to be alone with my thoughts and ideas, so these absolutely boring hallways are the perfect place to be. Maybe thinking about the boringness of the hallways is some kind of coping mechanism to try to avoid thinking about the extremely strange experience I just had, or maybe I'm just struggling to formulate coherent thoughts about it. Maybe I'm too stupid to go on thinking walks. Maybe I should just go back to class. Or maybe I just got told that my siblings were drug-using necromancers who broke the laws of the universe and got killed as a result of it, and there's a part of me that wants to see what will happen if I believe it. It's not that I want to believe it. I don't want to think that my sister was the kind of person to do insane drugs and had destructive powers to revive people from the dead. There's a 99% chance that it's all shit, and that Roxy or Roxanne or whatever was absolutely crazy, but that 1% is intriguing. My sister's death has always been a mystery to our whole town. Multiple people saw the car, but everyone disagreed on who was driving it. By the time their bodies were found, neither one of them was distinguishably in the driver's seat or passenger's seat, and it remained a mystery who was driving. No one could explain how they flew off the bridge so fast and so violently, but the universe-being-angry-at-them theory could. The universe-anger theory could finally explain how my sister died so suddenly with so little warning, how a thunderstorm came out of nowhere in early June, how two kids who did nothing wrong could end up dead without being able to even put up a fight. Maybe that's why I want to explore this theory more. Because for the past two years, the death of my sister has been half a mystery. The girl who woke up in the same house as me and ate cereal with me that morning was dead that night, and I didn't know half the reason why. It'll be three years on June 8th. I think three years is too long of a time to wait for answers, especially for something this important. For me, I just want to know what happened. I just want anything to understand the event that took my sister from me, I'm not like Vanessa, who's hell-bent on finding out specifically who was driving so she can take out her anger-

Vanessa. Vanessa's a part of this, too. I know why she hates me- because she thinks my sister drove the car that our siblings died in- but I don't know why I decided to hate her back. Well, I kind of do. She started being awful to me, saying horrible things at first, and then it eased down into just generally being annoying and making my life as bad as she could make it. So I annoyed her back, and I competed with her and rubbed things in her face and made fun of her. But now we're in our third year of hating each other, and I'm sick of it. I don't like her, not at all, she's annoying and has anger issues and gatekeeps things, but I don't want to hate her. Hating people gets tiring, especially since now that we're older, we have a bunch of friends in common. Hanging out with friends is insanely awkward because I have to sit on the opposite end of the couch from her every time, or I have to glare at her, or I have to just deal with whatever she does to me, and for what? Because she said some mean things to me in 8th grade? It's just stupid. But, even though she didn't want to walk around the school with me, maybe she does hate me less than I thought she did. December 14th. She doesn't expect me to use that information to hack into her parents' bank accounts, and that's progress.

The bell rings suddenly, shocking me back out of my thoughts and into reality with a slight jumpscare. The halls fill with kids quickly, and I blend into them, walking to my fifth period classroom silently and sitting down at a desk in the back of the classroom. More and more classmates enter the room, all of them laughing and talking.