We all go a little mad sometimes

Chapter 1: What's your favorite scary movie?

*** Before reading this story, you should probably watch Scream first so you won't be horribly confused :P Enjoy!                                                                                ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was there in Woodsboro when the murders happened. Of course a lot of people say that because they want to be the center of attention wherever they are. But I don't say it often. It's a secret I keep to myself along with all the others that I've held onto for so long.

I'm a quiet person. People don't seem to like that, at least they didn't back in High School. So it was no surprise that when my family moved to Woodsboro a year before the murders happened it was the same type of hell I'd gone through before. I didn't talk to that many people but I quickly bonded with Randy Meeks and got a job at the same video store he worked at. Movies were my passion, horror films in particular. Movies and books and kicking Randy's ass at video games once the store was closed down.

I'd heard about Sydney Prescott's mother and how she'd died. Everyone in that town had. As I walked along the crowded hallways from class to class and saw her hanging out with her friends I always felt very out of place and detached from her. It was like she'd held onto that tragedy as though no one else had ever lost anything in their life. I wondered if she thought that gave her a pass for whatever she did. I'd lost my grandfather to a crippling cancer that had made him suffer for weeks before he lost the fight, I doubted that Mrs. Prescott had to deal with pain for that long.

Dark thoughts like that haunted me a lot. Girls like her and her friend set my teeth on edge. Which was probably why I found such a release in my horror movies. I could imagine the people who'd treated me like dirt, who'd spit on me and knocked me to the ground that day being sliced open by Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, and it made me smile, helping that darkness slip away without me having to be arrested.

So imagine my surprise the day I first saw Billy Loomis and Sydney next to her locker talking and touching, holding hands. Billy was thin and gorgeous, a Johnny Depp look-a-like with a hunger about him that I could see even from where I stood beside the water fountain. His hair hung in front of his dark eyes, eyes that never missed a movement Sydney made, or anyone else around them for that matter. How I'd never seen him before was beyond me.

I wondered while I watched them, if anyone else had noticed the brief glares he gave to some of the other students as they walked by or how his long fingered hands would sometimes ball into fists when a particularly annoying fellow student would pass him.

It was during my pseudo spying that Tatum Riley walked up to Sydney, cutting off Billy in mid-sentence. Tatum was one of the most superficial girls I'd ever seen. The fashion plate of the school, she happened to be Sydney's best friend from what Randy had told me during closing one night. Billy didn't look very thrilled at her appearance and slumped up against the locker to wait for her to leave. It was then, while his eyes roamed along the hall that he saw me.

I froze when those eyes locked onto mine, never wavering except to run up and down me appraisingly. They stopped for a moment on my Nightmare on Elm Street t-shirt and I thought I saw a corner of his mouth turn up. Then Tatum was waving her hand in his face to get his attention and the moment was broken. I saw his mask fall back into place and I felt myself released from the hold his gaze had on me. It nearly made me stagger and I quickly headed off to the study hall I had that next period, rattled and curious.

Things were rather uneventful after that, at least for the next few weeks. It was spring break, and Sydney had left with her father to go on a trip to visit her grandparents up the coast. She'd taken the up-beat Tatum with her, which left Tatum's boyfriend, Stu, alone in town to torment Randy and I at the video store.