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A/N: long chapter, very sorry
DEAR DIARY,
My summer experience still leaves much to be desired. I've jumped from a cliff, I've been to an arcade and I've been to a parade with some new friends. This could be a good thing, if it wasn't drowned out by everything horrible at home.
Since Summer started, I have been attacked by a large shark in my living room. Beaten by Henry. Beaten by my father. Lost my bedroom door, had my mother's necklace broken and smashed. And on top of it all, I'm pretty sure this town is cursed somehow.
All of my friends and I have been seeing different scary things. I would say the shark wasn't real and think rationally, except I know that it was because I have an injury to prove it. This type of thing can't be real, it's fiction. Horror fiction that someone only sees in a film or a book, not in the lives of eight thirteen year olds. It's weird.
Bill saw his missing brother. Stanley saw a weird woman. Eddie saw a walking disease. Beverly's bloody bathroom. Throughout all of what we've been through, I hadn't questioned a thing because I didn't want to know. But it was getting odd now. Odd and scary. My horrors are enough with the home I live in, but this added being, this curse...I don't like it.
•*•*•*•*•
A loud thud on her doorframe shook Amanda from her sleep. Lay in the confines of her scratchy comforter and her flat pillows, she had sought refuge in her dreaming once she had decided that her day was done. Nothing was left for her in the daylight that overlooked her sorrowful life - so she slept, her diary clasped loosely in her hand, still open on the page she had been writing. Though her sentence had been finished, the page still held tempting blank lines for her to fill in.
"Get up." Henry grunted, his hand slamming against her doorframe again, stirring her once more. Amanda blinked blearily, but sat up slowly and carefully, her vision changing from a swimming blur to adjusting to clearness.
The boy stood in her doorway was her brother. But not the one she had encountered last night when he had grasped the necklace crudely from her neck, leaving a nail scratch in his wake. He was the one that took whatever violence was in store for Amanda: sometimes she thought he cared, but other times she reckoned he was maybe just too weak to fight back despite his bravado of toughness.
A blue, bruised, blotchy ring surrounded his right eye. Swirls of purple mixed within it as though he'd been splattered with combined paint. Other than that he looked as he always did, baggy tank top showing off his arms with cargo jeans resting on his legs. Hiding himself from everyone else. Much like Amanda did.
