sweater weather

36: i saw her die

I saw Grace Spencer die.

No, I can't tell you how those looming, dangerous figures killed her, so it's no use asking me. It makes me sick to my stomach just to recall the red liquid that stained the pale sweater of my stunning neighbor. As I confess to you, the young police officer tying away at your gleaming keyboard, the terrified beg for help of Grace still rings in my ears. You ask me if there's more to the story - if I even glimpsed one of the men's faces - but there is no more. Or, at least, no more that you will hear. After I am forced to listen to another minute of that awful clacking away at your shining, brand-new laptop's keys, you address me by name - Allie, a childish moniker that I have desperately wished to leave behind for so many years now - and allow me to leave my temporary prison. As I round the corner of the police station, my steps timid and uneven and, quite frankly, terrified, I can hear you follow me down, hand-in-hand with a curly-haired coworker as the two of you gossip about me, the fragile girl broken by the death of someone who she barely even knew, and I hate you and your pretty little girlfriend in that moment. I despise you. How dare you? You didn't know Grace. You don't know me. You don't know how I felt utterly and completely responsible of the death of this girl who so many say was foolish - foolish to wear anything but a full-length, sleeved dress, foolish to go out into the cold, black night without a friend by her side, foolish to want to have a good time. Foolish for dying - as if if was her fault. You don't know.

It is bitterly cold when I exit the police station, and I shiver despite myself, knowing that it would have been wise to bring even the thinnest of coats with me. Footsteps pound the scratchy gravel behind me, but I am too preoccupied with trying to remember what the killer looked like to hear it. Foolishly, I turn around, and, without even knowing the murderer's face, I am certain that it is them. I cry out for help, hoping that my saviour will pop out of nowhere and rescue me, but I am dead before a second cry for help can escape my chapped, thin lips.

It is your fault.