ONE LAST TIME (Discontinued)

CHAPTER 4 (Part 1)

Author's note: Hello lovely people! I'm really sorry for this late update but I had a bit of a writer's block for a while so I wasn't able to write this properly. But when I got it under control, I ended up writing a HUGE chapter that exceeded the character limit of 15,000 words. Therefore, I have divided this chapter into two parts. The next part will be uploaded shortly. 

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The loud, shrill ring of my alarm woke me up with a start. It didn't take long to get me completely awake to reach out and shut it close. I barely slept these days, so my sleep was as light as a feather.

I groaned as the sunlight streaming in through the windows fell on my face and reached up to rub my eyes, feeling the fatigue and remembrance of last night crash into me full force.

I jolted up straight, recollecting each and every event of the disaster that was last night. For confirmation, I looked around and saw the red dress hanging on the back of a chair and my heels lying scattered on the floor. I turned around to look in the Mirror of my dresser and saw streaks of black mascara running down from my face, from the time I had cried my eyes out last night.

I didn't remember much after my emotional breakdown on the staircase. I vaguely recalled Alya and Aryaman gently lifting me from the floor and driving me home. After that, the emotions, the stress, the fatigue and exhaustion had taken over me and I had surrendered to sleep before my mind could torture me more.

I sighed as I touched the sides of my cheek. I looked worse than what I had looked yesterday. You know your life is spiraling down the drain, when you wake up worse off than what you were before. And since many people were interested in my life these days, I was sure that the rest of the clan had been informed about my emotional train wreck and were probably discussing about it right this second.

I grabbed my phone from the side table and gingerly opened our Whatsapp group. I wasn't surprised when I saw over 300+ messages. After the night all of us had had, we all had a lot to discuss.

I stifled a laugh when I saw that Alya had renamed the group, "The Damned Souls."

How accurate.

I scrolled through the messages rapidly and saw that it was mostly Mukti complaining about Maddy in capitals, Alya attempting reason and Dhruv mostly silent. That struck me odd and I realized with dismay that we were all going to see that Maddy again in college today. And the bombs that would explode after that fatal encounter would surely leave behind a lot of collateral damage.

My head throbbed even thinking about it. I hadn't yet wrapped my head around the appearance of Maddy and the fact that they had the same voice. It was too injurious for my mental sanity and the Fab5 reaction to this was a different ballgame all together.

I didn't have it in me to deal with this. Still, I was glad to know that, thankfully, Alya and Aryaman had the decency to not tell anyone about my emotional breakdown as I found no discussion about it on chat. It was good that they didn't know. I wasn't up for another lecture about moving on, cherishing memories and blah...Blah...blah...From any of them.

Just as I was about to close our chats, I found a direct messages from Aryaman and I frowned. This wasn't good.

*Are you okay?*
*Please tell me. I'm worried*
*Are you coming to college today.*
*If you are, please meet me at the main gate.*
*We need to talk.*
*It's important.*

I frowned harder. I was sure what this was about. I didn't put it past Aryaman to sit up the entire night and try to investigate into the mystery of the watch. Instinctively I looked up at my bag that still contained that silver object. Coincidentally my bag was on the same chair as my red dress. Brilliant. Today, the universe was out to get me.