The Note of Darkness

The Note of Darkness

There was once this boy named Zack that had a normal life at a normal school. His life through middle school was fantastic until he got to 11th grade. He started to change from a sweet personality to a more rebellious, ignorant, selfish, and cruel character. As he began to change personality, he also began to change in his physical aspects, slowly but thoroughly. His dark brown hair had been turned into a dark bluish color. His skin started to turn from white to a more tanned color. His eyes turned from brown to grey. All of this reflected his character as how he was in the inside. All darkness. When this happened, he was obviously surprised and didn't understand what was happening to him but just ignored it. In school he started to wear jackets so no one would notice his big change. One day, he went to his locker to get some books and found a note lying on top of them.

"Be careful with your actions. It may turn out bad enough if you don't stop your rebellious personality. If you keep ignoring the changes, you will regret it."

He didn't know who would've sent that note. One thing that he was sure of is that this person, whoever it was, knew about his change. He decided to ignore it for the time being. Weeks passed; he went to parties and skipped classes. He didn't care about anything or anyone.

There came this day that he didn't know would change his life forever.

Zack went to first period and sat at the back of the class. He heard a lot of murmuring from people and caught something from one of the girls.

"...don't know how she is."

"Yeah, but we can try to know her better. See if the new girl could fit in our group."

"I'm not sure, maybe we should..."

 'A new girl,' he thought, 'Well, wish her luck, although I don't care what she does or doesn't do, but I pretty much know everyone around here. Yeah, not good.'

Time flew by and it was time for lunch. Zack got up from his chair and began to walk to the lunchroom. He got a tray, paid for the food, and went to sit with his group in a corner of the room. When he finished, he went to the trash can and dumped his leftovers, but he didn't notice when a girl came over to him.

"Hi. M-my name is Lila," she said stretching out her hand for him to shake.

He had never seen a girl like her in his school before. She had bright brown eyes and long, wavy, dirty-blond hair. ‘This must be the new girl’, he thought. It was obvious she was nervous as she spoke. He heard it in her voice. Peering over the lunchroom he saw a group of girls giggling and looking in their direction. He almost missed it, but saw one of them pass a few bucks under the table to another girl. A bet.

Suddenly, he heard a whistle from the group of guys he was in.

"Nice chick you got there, Zack!" a guy said then everyone in their group erupted into laughter.

He looked at the new girl. He saw that she was blushing and looking down at her shoes. He decided to ignore her and walked out of the room, leaving Lila behind.

Weeks passed on, everyone doing their thing. Then Lila began to look for Zack at lunch times. One day Zack finished his lunch and went to the school's backyard to sit on the grass below a tree. He saw Lila coming over with a bunch of books, almost falling to the ground. She looked kind of funny, actually. Finally she collapsed beside him, all the books scattered over the ground. He knew she came here to try and study with him, but he didn't even care. He got out his iPod and searched for a song to play. He finally settled on "Against All Evil" by We Ignite, putting his headphones on. She seemed oblivious to him not paying attention to her and kept talking about the classes and what they needed to learn for the tests they had. She kept coming and going all lunch breaks she could to help him study.

One afternoon, Zack decided to go to the school's garden to be in peace, alone. He walked on and on taking everything in. It was a big beautiful garden. Green nature all over the place. He saw some flowers and decided to pick one up. When he touched the flower he was shocked when that flower died and lost its color. He tried touching another one and another, but every single flower he touched died under his hand. He suddenly stopped when he saw Lila coming over to him.

"Hey! What have you been up to, Zack?" she said.

"Nothing," he responded looking at the flowers, still shocked about what his hand did.

Lila saw the shocked look on his face and followed his gaze to the dead flowers. She gasped and went to touch one of them. She quickly retreated her hand when she felt a slight burn by touching the flower.

"Ouch. It burned me. That's strange," she said as she rubbed her hand where the burn left a mark.

She reached out to Zack to see if he was okay. He suddenly backed off, not wanting to hurt anything or anyone more. She seemed hurt by his sudden reaction, but began to walk around the garden. She began to sing a song and Zack got lost in her melodic singing, listening to her beautiful voice, calming him down.

***

December came along with a lot of snow falling to the ground. He kept seeing Lila at the beginning of December, but then she didn't come back to school. It was like she disappeared in the snow. He didn't hear from her or saw her anymore.

Finals came and Zack decided to ask someone about Lila. He went through the school's halls and spotted the group of girls in which Lila sometimes hung out with.

"Um, excuse me. Has anyone seen Lila?" he asked as they all looked at him.

"Didn't you know? She died last week," one of them told him.

"What? Sorry, I think I didn't hear right," he responded.

"She died from a strange disease or something. No one knows what it really was," the girl ended.

He felt like the world was crashing down on him. He quickly backed away and started to run through the halls until he found the door to the garden. He burst through and ran hard, the garden all covered in snow. The grass, the trees, the bushes, everything. All flowers gone. He reached the place where he and Lila had been and sank to his knees as a single tear fell from his face to the snow. He never thought he had developed feelings for her, but the truth was that she had impacted his life more than he thought she could.

As he lifted his head, he saw a red rose a little farther away sticking out from the ground. How can a rose be alive when it's the middle of winter?

Zack crawled toward it and found a note attached to it. Picking it up, he read:

"I told you that you would regret it. You didn't listen to me and look at what happened. She died from just a burn from a certain flower that YOU touched. It was YOUR fault,"

"No, no," he murmured as unshed tears came rolling down his face.

"Now it's time for you to join her, rebel. Your time is up."

He had the sudden urge to put the note back to where it was, but as he touched the rose, he saw as it began to falter and die, losing its color from red to black. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his abdomen. When he checked, he was losing blood. He put his hand against his abdomen to try and stop the bleeding, but couldn't. Red drops of blood dropped from his hand to the white snow as he slowly fell asleep into the darkness, forever.

The note writer will now head for another victim, another rebellious kid. It will find the kid's weakness, until the end.

"One has to treasure what one has before one loses it and gets lost for eternity."