Killed Killers (NaNoWriMo 2015)

Chapter Two

    Ere managed to finish the day without any more strange happenings, although she was so distracted during the test in science that she couldn't have done very well. That was going to bring her grade down at least one letter grade, if not more. She finished out the day and was heading home on the bus before she managed to forget about the face in the window for any significant amount of time. Since she was only a freshman, she couldn't drive herself home yet, and she didn't have any older siblings to drive her home from school. She didn't have any siblings at all, because she was the first child, and although both of her parents had wanted many more children, the accident had happened to her mom and her father had been left with a year old baby and a dead wife. It wasn't until two years later when her mom's death had been looked into again that her dad had learned about the child that her mom had been pregnant with at the time.

    Ere's dad had never been what you might call a 'present parent'. He had worked two or three jobs ever since her mom had died and still had trouble making ends meet. She didn't hate her dad for it, though, in fact it was the complete opposite. Where other children might have resented him for his lack of direct care and affection, Ere never found it a problem. She knew that he loved her, and she also knew that he worked really hard to make sure that she had clothes on her back and food on the table. He wanted nothing more than to make sure that she had a comfortable childhood, and she knew that he loved her, whether or not he was around much to tell her that himself.

    Since Ere lived right by Zo, they rode the same bus and got off at the same stop. They were the very last people to get off the bus, though, so that meant that Ere had to sit through nearly two and a half hours of Zo ranting about how stupid her homework was, while Ere actually attempted to complete hers before they made it home. Since her dad worked so much, Ere had been pretty much running the house since she was around five years old, or as soon as she could consistently remember to turn off the stove burners. She had been cooking dinner for her and her dad, cleaning the house, keeping his jobs and schedule in order, and making sure to manage her schoolwork and social life as well. She had a pretty lose leash when it came to her dad. She seriously doubted that he would even know where to start restricting her if he had the time and discipline to try.

Ere's father was a rather eccentric man. He had premature grey hair that looked like he stuck his finger in an electrical outlet no matter how hard he tried to tame it. He looked like a mad scientist, and if he were put in a room with a bunch of vials of colored fluids and bubbling stuff and tubes and wires and the like, he could totally play the part. She often wondered why he hadn't attempted to get an acting job yet.

Today, her two hour long bus ride with Zo consisted of whining about how pointless isosceles triangles were and attempting to figure out exactly what Zo's problem was today. It wasn't like the triangles were too hard or anything, so why could she just do the math and get good grades and be done with it? It honestly wasn't hard. By the time that they finally reached their bus stop, Ere was very much over Zo's whining.

As they dismounted the bus, Zo piped up again.

"So, I trust that you are coming to the football game tonight?" She asked, looking at Ere expectantly. Ere knew nothing about the so called football game, and therefore could not have been planning on coming. She also had quite a bit of homework, and although she knew just how popular friday night football was at her school, she didn't much care for social events of any kind.

"No, I wasn't planning on it." She responded in a failed attempt at being nonchalant. For some reason that Ere could just not grasp, Zo had latched onto her social life and was desperately trying to make it much more than it currently was, and where Ere was really comfortable with it being. While Zo couldn't understand being comfortable with having only one friend, Ere couldn't find herself really wanting any more than that, much less having time for more. With all of the home care that she had to do and basically playing the 'mom' role for both herself and her father, she didn't have time for many social activities. Plus, football games usually fell directly on the time when her dad got home, and if she went to them she wouldn't get to eat dinner with her father.