Fears To Face

∞ Chapter 12 ∞

~ Kayley ~

Three long days had past.

Sleep had not found me at all until I finally fell  asleep at five-thirty this morning again. The first night had been a disaster. All night long the afternoon had come back to me in vague images sometimes, but sharp ones mostly. All the vague one’s had been the good parts, flattened and made unimportant by the sharp pictures of the horrible scenes. My legs had felt wobbly and unsteady as I crossed my room slowly in the morning after I reluctantly crawled out of bed. In the bathroom I’d looked in the mirror for the first time since I had stepped into Rayne’s car.

I’d sucked in my breath. Sam did not exaggerate when he said I looked like I had drowned. My hair was pointing into every direction, like a bird had tried to make a nest in it and then had fought with its partner. I completely had forgotten to tie it up the night before. My face was pale, more white than normal. There were huge dark bags under my big reddish eyes, watery streams of black mascara ran over my cheeks. I ran my hands through my hair. It was all knotted together. I sighed. How was I ever going to get it straight again?

After a quarter of brushing my hair it finally looked like my hair again. I was fully dressed, in a tight navy jeans and a simple shirt. I still looked terrible, although I had faded the bags at least half, my eyes still clearly needed recovery time.

School had been horrifying, the teachers seemed to ramble and I couldn’t make out a word they said, my notebook was just as empty  after class as is had been before. Mallory had told me over and over how screwed up I looked and Gwyn eyed me every five minutes, checking whether I would burst out in tears and asked me several times a day whether I wanted to talk about it. No, I don’t want to talk about it, I want to forget. I just told her that I just had a bad night sleep and I was fine.

But I couldn’t fool Gwyn. She knew me well enough that something was seriously wrong and the fact that I hadn’t slept the second night either didn’t help decreasing her suspicion. Near the end of Tuesday I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore and told her, “Yes, something is wrong. But I can’t explain it and honestly I just want to forget it. I’ll be fine.” She stopped asking after that, but still looked at me every few minutes. Like Gwyn’s narrow eyes weren’t enough, Sam eyed me suspiciously all day. His grey-blue eyes big and worried. If I hadn’t been so annoyed by it, it would have been very sweet. Even the teachers had gotten suspicious when my face only looked worse over the days.

It was Wednesday now, the end of my classes.  The sick feeling in my gut finally decreased to bearable halfway through the day, possibly because I slept a one and a half hour last night. This had been the first class I had paid attention again, for like thirty per cent and I even made a few notes, which I now saw I couldn’t decode anymore. I sighed. Yesterday I had only sat in my chair, staring out into something that wasn’t there, with huge red eyes. Doing much more was made impossible by that sick feeling of disgust with myself and Rayne.

It wasn’t even that I heartbroken, because I really wasn’t. I mean, come on, I’d know him for what? A week? Even though I cared for the guy, that was all. No, the reason I felt like absolute crap was because this whole shit situation was exactly what I had known would happen. This was the reason I always told myself I wouldn’t get involved with another werewolf. Because he had scared the living hell out of me by what had happened. How I felt when I’d first ran into him was nothing compared to the fear I’d felt in that park. On top of that, the idea that there were werewolves out there who wanted to rule over the humans, which apparently included Rayne, was freaking me out. What if my mom… I swallowed. My mom was a loving person, she liked everyone she met. I couldn’t even comprehend the idea of my mother sharing that Conner’s view on humans.