Black Out

Back To School

It's the first day of school. Mathana usually walked to this atrocity with me. But she's not here, no matter what I saw last night. She was buried, I threw a handful of dirt on her myself. Yesterday was such a drag. Rain had fallen lightly in the background as the pastor began the funeral, and the lights flickered in the church. Everyone was sad, like they really knew Matahana. All of her ex-boyfriends and one ex-girlfriend sat and stood in the back. Due to the amount of damage, Mrs. Swings explained, done to her face the casket will be closed. I didn't care much for an open casket. It just meant that she could see me, at the very least, crying. Why would I subject myself to that? I care too much to let her see me break in front of up to a hundred, maybe more, people.
Pastor Grunwald, an elderly man who enjoyed preaching about the Glory of God to any and everyone he came in contact with, issued a moments silence to honour Mathana. Everyone bowed their head, but I stared at her picture. The same picture that warranted my disapproval at our lunch table outside the front doors of the only high school in town. Though there hardly had been five-hundred people, if that, in our small town, there were roughly three-hundred in the school. All with sad eyes, confused, and afraid to come to me and say anything. Thinking that if they did, they would say the wrong thing and I'd crack.
As I said, the picture that sat on our lunch table was a picture I took a few years ago of her. She was holding a teddy bear to her nose, smiling behind it, her long hair falling beside her in a sweet, elegant style. She had on nerd glasses she got that summer due to her loss of contacts. I never saw her without her contacts in so that day I snapped a couple of pictures. She was cute, but there were better pictures from that week they could have used. Why did they use that one?
That same week, I met Mathana's then-boyfriend from that summer. It was mid-July, and they had been dating since January. We were freshmen and he was supposedly a seventeen year old from a high school the next town over. The same town she was found in last week.
Ron had a best friend, Martha, who shared an apartment with him. She was exceptionally nice, but there were certain things that didn't quite make sense. Like, what seventeen year old owns his own apartment? If he loved Mathana, why was he living with a girl slightly older than him? I never really heard anything about him, either. She hardly mentioned him, but of course she managed to mention his age. "I have a date with an older guy," she would tell me when she ditched me at parties, sleepovers, and everything else. One day I pushed the subject.
"Who?" I asked. The day was calm and eerie, quite humid. A very strange day for a winter day, though it was the transition of winter to spring. She stared at me as she slipped her black dress with a red bow on the hip over her swimsuit. She turned to me to zip the back for her. I zipped it and she clanked on her black wedges.
"Just some guy." She uttered rather confident. "Put down the big brother guard," she demanded.
"Rain!" I heard my name. I turned to find Jeremy walking up to me. He went to reach out for a comforting hug, but backed away. "You shouldn't be here." Tears were rushing to my eyes but I forced them back. There was no way I was letting them see me cry. They don't deserve it.
Jeremy was the brunette jock who asked me if I was the "emo" kid the winter before Mathana disappeared. We had become friends shortly after. Mathana didn't like him, and his friends didn't like me so we hung out in secret; Skipping school to go to his house to play Legend of Zelda until fourth hour when I had lunch with Mathana, on the weekends that Mathana hung out with her boyfriend at the time, going to the park and avoiding people we knew whilst playing Hide and Seek, Marco Polo, etcetera. But Mathana is dead now. Except last night's memory of her in my room.

"Mathana?" asked I. "I thought you were dead." She looked at me whilst her hand was wrapped around my phone, slightly drowning out the sound of My Chemical Romance's "I Don't Love You".
"I heard that, too." She smiled and bent down to hug me. I sat up and wrapped my arms around her tiny frame.
"What happened?" I asked, pulling the blankets off of me, running to the door and closing it.
"I can't come home, Rain." The seriousness of her tone was so breathtaking, so insidious, that chills ran down my back.
"What?!" I said after my moment of silence. "Why not?!"
"It's not safe. Someone's after me." Mathana lifted her shirt revealing her toned abdomen. Stitches covered a good six inch long puncture wound, four slightly smaller ones, and one slice. I gasped at them; Sorted in such a manner almost as perfect as The Starry Night. It captivated me to think someone hated her that much.
"Who? Who would do this?" I inquired, walking toward her. She backed away, something she knew I didn't process well, quickly looked at the ground, then looked at me. Her eyes were filled with depression.
"Rain, you have a gift. If you don't figure out what it is soon, you're going to be next." A knock at the door stole my attention from her. I turned to look at the closed door as it creaked open.
"Rain?" My mother peeked around the crack she created upon thrusting the door open. I quickly turned back to see if Mathana was there. She wasn't. But the curtains in front of the bay window flipped and floated in the wind. "Are you okay?"