Mitchie was not amused.
Sure, being silly once in awhile was fun and all, but acting like you’re on magic mushrooms every minute of the day gets irritating after some time.
She sighed in exasperation and rolled her chocolate brown eyes once again. Her shoulder-cropped brunette hair was streaked with rays of gold, making her head look like a caramel brownie. She flipped her bangs to the side of her face and stared at the whiteboard.
She barely focused in the math class. It was an easy subject for her, and she had already reviewed this before. Her head drooped as her thoughts began to waver.
You see, Mitchie, unlike all of her friends, was calm and collected. She was organized and was a true perfectionist at heart.
But only when it came to things she cared about.
She had a dark sense of humour; sarcasm was her mother tongue. She was never afraid to tell people exactly what she thought, and one she made her mind up, no-one could ever change it. Due to this, her comforting abilities lacked quite a bit. But that was okay; the comforting was usually left to Natalie and Emey before it could make its way to her.
Mitchie was a dark horse, a lone star; you couldn’t help but notice her, but were always too afraid to come her way. She didn’t mind that. She had more than enough people to handle.
The bell rang and Mitchie grabbed her stuff before storming out of the classroom for break.
But she wasn’t always like this.
When Mitchie was ten years old, Emey and other close friends and relatives had a habit of calling her ‘Chipmunk’. Mitchie always thought it was because of her teeth, which used to stick out before she got braces. However, Emey had different reasons.
When Emey first told Mitchie this, she automatically demanded for an explanation. But her timing was bad as everyone was leaving for their summer holidays – including Emey.
So Emey left and Mitchie was forced to wait for a response. She realized later on that this response could take three months to actually come.
But luckily, it didn’t.
Whilst Mitchie left for Florida to visit her cousins, Emey was in an RV, driving around America with an old man and his two grandchildren. One of them was a girl called Rosie, the other was a boy called Ben.
Yes, that Ben.
And as it was the old man’s plan to visit every state in the country, the group eventually stopped in Florida. And that was Mitchie’s first time meeting Ben. And a lot of shit got down.
During their stay in Florida, Mitchie managed to get in contact with monsters and mad scientists and giant robots. It appeared that the travelling group was targeted by many others, and as Emey’s friend, Mitchie ended up being a part of it.
But it wasn’t all too bad back then. Ben was a bright, cheery boy. He laughed and laughed all the time and had an amazing sense of humour. He was short, too; he only reached about four feet in height. It was amusing to think that both him and Emey were the same age, as Emey was more than a foot taller than him and towered above most ten year olds at the time. And because of Emey’s automatic need t mother any little boy, she constantly acted like she was Ben’s mother (and ironically, he didn’t have one).
Rosie was a stick in the mud, though. She was Ben’s cousin, and spent half of her daily life either complaining or trying to prove people wrong. She thought she was smart, and she was; but Emey was smarter and almost always managed to prove Rosie to be wrong. The two never really got along. Emey thought that Rosie was just a spoiled brat and never really managed to warm up to her.
Mitchie got along well with both. She liked Ben’s sense of humour and enjoyed her ‘intellectual conversations’ with Rosie. Due to the excitement of it all, Mitchie forgot about the question she’d wanted Emey to answer until they left four days later.
A month after the visit, three days before the start of her life as a fifth grader, Mitchie was back in California with her parents when Emey and company drove over to her apartment and asked her if she wanted to go for a spin. So she did.
By now, four other people had joined the party.
There was Oz, a tall blond boy with brilliant green eyes and a perfect posture. He was originally British, but had lived in America for most of his life with Ben as his best friend and ex-neighbour.
Then there was Alice, a slim Columbian girl who spent most of her life living in Mexico before she was forced to become Oz’s fiancée due to their parents’ friendship and had to move somewhere where she could be near him. She never cut her hair in her life.
Then there were two faces that she’d met before – Emey’s neighbours, Rin and Len. The two were identical twins with very different attitudes. Both were blond and blue eyed and really tall, but unlike Len, who was an asshole, Rin was one of the sweetest girls anyone could have ever met.
So all eight kids sat in the RV and sang to Def Lepard’s ‘Rocket’ like there was no tomorrow.
After driving for about an hour, Ben wanted the gang to meet his dog, Rottie the Rottweiler, so the old man stopped by Ben’s house –
Where his dad was waiting with a gun.
Ben immediately started to shout at him, throwing questions that were left unanswered. The old man tried to talk to his son and tell him to put the gun away, that it was scaring the children. But he didn’t care. He pushed through and stopped when he was in front of Emey.
He pointed the gun at her head.
And before she could even move, before Ben could tell him to stop, before Mitchie could even scream, Emey was on the ground, lying in a pool of her own blood.
After that, Mitchie gave up on trying to find answers and having doubts.
All there ever was was the truth.
YOU ARE READING
I've Got A Story To Tell
Mystery / Thriller"Myles Kyles died four years ago. Or so we thought." After thirteen year old Emey witnessed the death of Dylan Martinez, she began to notice strange things. Her dreams were too real, her reality too fake. Everything she ever knew to be true didn't m...