𝗦𝗖𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗠 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗬𝗢𝗨 , 𝗴𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗲

epilogue

"... I know what you did..."

__

My name is [Name] Riley.
I am 17 years old.
I am sitting in a hospital bed.
I miss my bed.
My butt hurts.
I miss my home.
...
I miss my sister.

I shook my head as I threw down the pencil onto my lap with a frustrated sigh. My fingers ached from the force I held the pencil with while writing in my newly appointed journal. Mr. Ryder, the psychiatrist that had been appointed to me, had given me the journal to document my mental state since the massacre at the Macher party as I way to make sure I was doing okay, yet it felt more like torture than a way to check up on how I was feeling mentally.

The only relief it gave me was a false sense of company. I hadn't spoken to anyone since I had been put into this room except the nurses that came and went, my doctor, and my psychiatrist. I ignored the outside world's efforts to get me to face the people I had betrayed despite the knocks on my door and the letters slipped into my room. It was lonely, no doubt, but I was too much of a coward to face the reality of what I had done.

What they had done.

The blood on their hands. The blood on mine. It stained. Stained my mind with guilt of what I had done; the path I had chosen. 10 people had died that night, and I could've prevented all 10 of them if I hadn't been so caught up in my own feelings.

In the end, I prevented one. One death. Yet the guilt didn't diminish in the slightest. The blood didn't wash away. Everything remained the same. Everyone remained dead. Except me.

I had hoped I would die that night whether it was on the floor or on that stretcher, but fate had refused to show me pity. Fate decided I needed to be punished for what I had done by keeping me alive. But that wasn't punishment enough; fate felt the need to punish me even more. Fate had kept them alive as well.

Billy Loomis and Stu Macher were alive and all because of me. I had saved them from death that night but sacrificed some of the people I loved the most. It was a fair price to pay for my actions, but I didn't realize that the transaction would actually happen. That they would actually be dead. Even as I thought that, my brain couldn't process the fact that they were dead. That they were all dead.

Tatum was dead.
Dewey was dead.
Randy was dead.
Gale was dead.
Dead, dead, dead, and more dead.

I coughed awkwardly as I averted my attention away from the journal and my depressing mindset to the hoard of pity gifts resting around my room. They had been gifted to me from all sorts of people; relatives, friends, even people I had never even talked to. I hadn't bothered reading a single one. They saw me as a hero. A survivor. I couldn't face them knowing that I was anything but those things.