.: Friend, please :. joshler

Chapter three.

10:03am

Tyler woke up from an odd dream, and mechanically looked at his phone like he did every morning, to check what time it was. The texts from Josh made his heart skip a beat.

Why would Josh text him first?

Josh had never been the first to send texts, even with his best friend.

What happened last night?

Tyler had no clue how he ended up in the bathroom, neither why the floor was covered with pills and what seemed to be...

... Puke?

It also smelled like burnt turkey in the oven.

Tyler started to freak out. Is this why Josh texted him? Josh never texted him. It might be because of something really important. Tyler unlocked his phone to see why Josh sent him two texts around 10am.

The two texts left Tyler shook. He didn't remember desperatly texting his best friend at 2am, neither coming to his house and.. What happened next? Did he leave Josh's neighborhood? And how did he end up in his bathroom anyway? The confused boy had to find answers.

First of all, Tyler needed to clean up his mess. There was no way his mom got the chance to see her 17 years-old son, swimming in his own puke, and tiny white pills that looked like peaceful waves and wandering fishes. She would brag about it for years.

He slowly stood up, resting against whatever was strong enough to support his weight (sink, toilets, wall...). When he was nearly standing on his feet, he felt a weird feeling in his stomach, like a recent bruise.

Tyler looked down at what he thought was his shirt, but the supposed shirt was burnt from the bottom to the middle. A huge burn covered his stomach.

How did he end up like this?

The burn was so fresh it could still smell like roasted chicken. Suddenly, Tyler felt an intense pain on his stomach, forcing him to bow down and rest against the wall, his hands on the ivory sink.

Suffocating, Tyler had to stay in this uncomfortable position for a few minutes. As the pain slowly faded away, he stood up again, facing the mirror.

His reflexion kind of scared him at first. His neck was black, as if he took a bath of coal. He had his favorite beanie on. He knew that the red beanie was on his desk the night before, but he had no clue how it ended up on his head. His black, half-burnt shirt, revealed a large bruise from his left rib to his right hip. He should've gone to the hospital, given that the bruise was extremely ugly and probably needed chirurgy. But his physical health would wait. He had more important things to deal with at this moment. Tyler also noticed that from his fingers to his forearms, it was the same black-ish color as his neck.

Whatever.

Somehow, Tyler managed to clean up the mess, saving all the pills that were not dirty.

Just in case.

The young boy tried to clean up all the coal (he didn't know what it was exactly, but reminded him of coal so he assumed it actually was) using the sink's fresh water to wake him up. Since it was hard to get the coal off of his skin, he decided that a shower would be more effective.

"Don't leave me alone."

As he was taking his pants off, Tyler heard it. Leave whom alone? And who was talking? Tyler assumed he was alone in the house, since nobody called for him yet and the whole house seemed quiet. The voice sounded like a whisper anyway.

Tyler didn't pay attention that much to this odd whisper, since he had already experienced this kind of things before.

The first time he heard a whisper, he was persuaded that his brother Zack was playing with him. It was around 1am, during an endless insomniac night that he was used to. It started with a slight, almost not perceptible whisper.