What She Left

chapter eight

     nine thirty-two a.m., march fifteenth, two thousand and seventeen

    When Mei woke up the morning of March Fifteenth, she felt different.

    She didn't really notice it until she arrived at school, crossing the green school lawn and swinging open the glass doors.

     Thousands of years of humans inhabiting the Earth, thousands of years since survival instinct was needed consistently. Thousands of years since the first humans relied on those feelings, their guts telling them something's not right. this isn't right.

     But even after those thousands of years, that instinct is still there. That gut feeling is still there, hidden behind the technology and innovations, but still present. And when Mei entered the school that day, she knew that this day wasn't normal. That little voice in her head, that little feeling in the back of her mind was telling her that something was wrong.

     But humans are fickle and stupid and make all the wrong choices. Humans ignore their guts and go against their survival instinct and do what everything in them is telling them not to do. Humans are trained since birth to ignore their gut, their instinct, because they have so many other things backing them, but little do they know that that little feeling does not care about all the technology and so called "safety" this modern world offers. All that instinct cares about it keeping you alive.

    But Mei cared about the fourth-period English quiz she had today and not the anxious little tingling on the back of her neck.

     When Mei walked into the school building that morning, Brigid had jogged up to her and linked her arm through Mei's. "It's a good day," she had said as a way of greeting.

     When Mei watched the bullet enter her best friend's stomach, she couldn't think of anything but look on Brigid's face this morning when she smiled. When Mei's arms, wrapped around Brigid's shoulders, were pulled to the ground with her, she couldn't think at all.

    Sound and thought rushed back to her as fast as it had gone. Brigid was screaming, writhing, gushing blood on the floor, on the wall, on Mei, on the dead bodies near her. "Stop," Mei said. "Stop!"
    
     Brigid did. She stopped screaming and was silently spasming on the tile floor. Even the white on her eyes had turned red with the blood that was everywhere, everywhere. Mei found her best friend's hand among the blood and other things that Mei desperately hoped weren't her intestines. "Brigid?"

     She went still as her eyes found Mei's. Brigid's mouth moved, but thick blood spilled out. Mei bent over her head, her tears making trails in Brigid's blood-covered face. "It's a good day," she said, because it was the only words she could find in her head. "As long as we're together it's always a good day."

     Then she was being pulled away, arms grabbing her and pulling her up, away, cmon, we have to go, we have to go, she's coming back. Mei heard someone screaming "No, no," over and over and over again, and she pressed her hands over her ears to make it quieter and realized that it was her screaming. Brigid was dead. Brigid was dead. Brigid and her brother were dead and Mei was not.

     The boy with the black hair that she saw this morning and knew his name was in front of her, we gotta go, we have to run, but she couldn's see anything but their blazing blue eyes, dead, open. The boy was silent. The dead were screaming.

     She was talking out loud. The people surrounding her, trying to convince her to run, were hearing everything.

     The boy with the black hair turned and brushed his hand over the eyelids of Brigid and Jeremy. The eyes were gone. The dead are dead.

     She turned away from the dead brother and sister and the hallway littered with blood and dead bodies and followed the boy with the black hair. Everything was dulled, blurred, like she had drunk too much whiskey, like she was asleep yet awake. Mei's hand was cold and empty. Brigid usually holds it.

      She didn't feel anything anymore. She didn't remember what fear felt like anymore. Fear was gone. She was just empty, her beating heart echoing off her tin shell. Empty.

     "One day we'll get old and have two classy penthouses at the top of some big building and have little dogs that fit in purses and eat caviar," Brigid says. "We'll be rich and get drunk on fancy wine all the time. And we'll be together. Of course. Why shouldn't we be? You should be with the people who make you happy."

     Mei was running away from her bloody, lifeless body.

     "Don't you see? We're practically soulmates. No, screw it," Brigid corrects herself. "We are soulmates. Who needs the love of your life when you have your soulmate?"

     The nonexistent wind is roaring in Mei's ears. A part of her is missing. A part of her has died.

     "It's a good day," Brigid laughs. "It's always a good day even thought you come in looking like death cause you were stupid and stayed up too late. It's a good day, Meilin, whether you like it or not, because we're alive and we're together. See?"

     Several people beside her were watching her cautiously. She was dripping with her best friend's blood and running for her life from a shooter who already took her life. That shooter already killed the good part of her. Brigid was the good part of her. Mei was not good. Mei was just as dead as the people on the floor. She just, unfortunately, had a beating heart.

     "What is it about the stars that makes you think about dying?" Brigid asks. "Maybe cause they're all dead. Right? I don't really know. I just know that when I look up at the sky, it makes me less afraid to die. Like I'll become a star. I hope I do."

     Mei could see in her mind the exact moment that the stars in Brigid's eyes died and she was gone.

     When Mei woke up in the morning of March Fifteenth, she did not think that she would watch the stars in her sky die out.