Born Wicked

LIV

I want to tell you I fought the good fight. I want to say that I haven't been completely miserable. I want to say that each night I don't wake from nightmares, screaming, alone in my house.

I can't.

I can't tell you those things because not a single one of them would be true. It's been weeks and it isn't getting better. It's like I'm dangling on the precipice, waiting to drop off of the edge into nothing.

That following Monday was bad. I walked to school and I sat in the library with Georgia until first period. I sat alone. Actually, sitting alone was how I spent my entire day.

At lunch. My table. My corner.

This was the shroud of melancholy that plagued me the entire day. Adding to my distress, Shane was back in school. He glowered at me darkly and I could feel the hatred, putrid and festering, rolling over me in undulating waves.

Davis and Ethan sat together which told me everything I needed to know. I'm on borrowed time. Every day since, they've sat together. Blythe and Shane are in no-man's land with the mundanes on the football team and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Julian sits with Mike and Tristan as far away from me as possible. He's driving his shiny, red Porsche again, so I guess he went home. That's good. Paige sits at her usual table with her mundane friends, completely at ease in her camouflage. Plain sight indeed.

I'm alone. Again. I'm friendless. Again.

I roll over and stare out of my window. The sky is gunmetal grey and the cold air seeps through my window pane. I bury myself deeper under my comforter. It's been a few weeks since that awful day. I groan as tears seep from the corners of my eyes and trail down my temples into my hair.

This is how I spend my mornings. Weeping and alone.

I can't tell visions from nightmares. They're all the same to me. Each time I see Julian, dying, with Ethan standing over him with who I now know to be Davis. I can only assume the others in the vision are Tobias and Elias and whomever else, the faces always become a blur.

When it isn't Julian, it's Gran. Her dead, pale eyes staring at nothing, drowning in a river of her own blood. She's no longer here to make me breakfast. Or cook dinner. I'm not helpless or anything, I just don't fucking care if I eat anymore. I pick at my lunches at school and sometimes pick at the food at Mad Max's. It's not half bad for a local greasy-spoon.

When it isn't Gran, it's my mom and dad. I see our house. I see their happy, loving faces. I see the horror and fear when they saw my name in flames. I remember the screams as they died in the fire.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The cycle continues in some cruel loop. Every. Single. Night. I haven't slept in weeks and it shows. I'm gaunt, my face chalky grey at best. My eyes are limp and flat and the other night, I showered and clumps of my hair kind of, fell out. I've lost at least ten –maybe fifteen, pounds. I wasn't that curvaceous to begin with, now I look positively skeletal. I see the knobs in my spine and what was once full and healthy, is now concave and sunken.

I stopped getting out of bed three days ago. It just stopped making sense, you know? I force myself up and then make myself go to school knowing I'm alone. I literally have nothing and no one. What. Is. The. Fucking. Point?

I'm unsure, but I think it's Friday. It could be Thursday. It's December. It's cold. The old house rattles in the wind and the creaks and groans are the only sound. It's in this silence, as I huddle beneath my cover, that I hear a knock at the front door.