Lover Dearest

Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

Track was wonderful. Almost all of the girls from the Bryant team were being enrolled in the Bauxite track team. We did an amazing workout of ten three hundred meter dashes and an ab and stretch workout afterwards. Of all the things I couldn't stand about the school, running helped erase the problems from my mind and just focus on the pain. I deserved it, anyway.

There were still a few cuts on my cheeks and hands from the glass and debris, but they were healing fairly quickly. I softly touched a line of cuts along the underside of my face. It started at my ear and ended at my throat. It wasn't deep and didn't bleed, I didn't even know I had a cut there until I woke up the next morning. I decided to take a mental inventory of myself.

Bruises on my arms, check. Fingerprint marks on my hands where Devin squeezed the heck out of me trying to save me, check. Giant scab gushing blood and puss on my shoulder that I have never seen before, check. I wasn't too freaked about finding mysterious cuts and bruises on my body randomly, it happens pretty often now. I probably do it to myself in my sleep anyway. I'm not too concerned with my outward injuries, it's my head and the thoughts it contains that worry me. How had I tried to kill myself? Of course I had thought about it before, who hasn't, but I had never thought about it more than one time. So how had I tried to kill myself in front of hundreds of people?

It had to be some form of hypnotism. I looked like I was in a trance on the video, so maybe I was having a psychotic breakdown from being scared out of my mind by the tornado. Maybe my brain wanted me to get closer to it to show myself that it wasn't going to kill me. The crazy tornado inside the building that wrapped itself around me and pushed me toward the bigger tornado must have been a hallucination caused by my mind's instability. Finally, a logical explanation to my demented mindset. It might not be a completely sane reason, but who ever said that I was sane?

I grab my bags from the locker room and head towards my car still in my workout clothes. I slowly ease out of the overcrowded parking lot and make my way back home. Out of the rear view mirror I notice a very familiar truck. It is black with extremely large KC lights and belongs to none other than Dallas Rutherford.

He is tailgating me to no end, so I speed up to get further away from him. He follows me all the way to my neighborhood and my road is a circle so I turn right and he turns left and I book it to my driveway. He took the long way around, so naturally I made it to my driveway first. As I step out of my car with all my bags, he comes down my driveway. I feel a premonition of danger trickle down my spine. As he steps out of the car I am already on my front porch steps and he calls my name with a stab of regret in his voice.

"What are you doing here, Dallas?" My voice held a tinge of tiredness with a stab of boredom. Frankly, his antics were getting old.

"I came here to apologize." His words seemed genuinely sincere, and I almost fell for it.

"Oh really? Please, I would love to hear an apology that is about two summers overdue." After I had found Dallas and my friend screwing, Dallas had never reached out to me in any way possible. He basically just fell off the face of the earth.

"I'm sorry that I never apologized to you after what happened, and I'm sorry I said those things about you today, but when you said all that 'bout jail, I lost it. So I hope you accept it and stop being mad at me. I mean, it was two years ago and I was hammered anyway. But there it is so, yeah."

"Thank you for coming all this way to apologize and I accept your apology, I forgive you. But that doesn't mean that I'll forget about what happened. We can be friends but there is no chance of us ever being more than that." I'm not going to be too nice to give him a false idea that I actually like him. It doesn't matter that he was drunk, he still chose to drink, he chose to go to that party, and he chose to make out with my friend. It is what it is.

"I hope I can show you I've changed. I slipped up today and was a huge jerk. And yeah, I did go to jail, and yeah it was for possession, but not in the way you think. Somebody planted drugs on my sister and they pulled her over when I was in the car and told them it was my car and I was teaching her to drive. I told them it was mine, and they arrested me."

His explanation made sense, and his southern accent accentuated the words, making them seem even more heartfelt and sincere. I motioned for him to follow after me into the house.

"God, that sucks. How is she doing, by the way?" I walked inside and grabbed a glass of water in the kitchen. He followed suit, shoving his hands in his pockets and standing there a bit awkwardly. I filled him a glass of water and he graciously accepted it. I wondered what caused his sudden change of heart. It was seriously unusual, but I wasn't about to make him angry. When Dallas is angry it is scarier than when I am.

"She's doin' great, stopped hangin' out with the friends that tried to use her as a drug mule. Got her grades up an everything." Dallas' little sister, Jami, used to be one of my close friends. Dallas is two years older than me and a senior, but Jami is the same age as me, sixteen. She and I stopped hanging out shortly after she started hanging out with the stoners. She died her naturally light blonde hair blue, shaved the sides of her head, and that was it. She was officially, 'one of them'. Bryant was very social based and clique oriented. Everyone had their specific group and I was somewhere between prep and loner. Prep because I used to be a cheerleader in, like, the sixth grade and people somehow remember that, and loner because I love being alone.

"That's good." I say awkwardly as he takes a few sips of his water. Why is he still here?

"Well I just came by to apologize and all that. Tell Devin I said hi." Dallas and Devin had become friends soon after Devin and I had started dating. Devin hadn't known that Dallas was the guy who broke my heart that one summer.

"Alright, I guess I'll see you at school. See you later." As soon as he stepped out the door I went into my room and flopped down on my bed and took a long needed power nap.

The dream started like any other, me falling off something and me jerking myself almost awake. But I forced myself to sleep more. The dream then replayed the tornado at the school, all the events playing in slow motion through my head, like brain was trying to tell me something and my mind just wouldn't cooperate.

Finally, at the part where Devin held onto me with both arms, my vision panned outside to the snarling tornado about to chomp into the building. I saw something shiny and glittering flying through the air. It looked like an elongated shard of glass, but when it soared closer with each rotation, I saw that there was something attached to the shard of glass.

My vision zoomed in on the object and it looked like a necklace roped around the piece of lethal glass. Before I could get a closer look at the beautiful gem etched onto the necklace, the clouds turned an ugly shade of near black and the outside world looked like death. The tornado became fueled by a funnel of water that washed into the center of the twister. The earth split open with a deafening crack and the ground beneath me started shifting under myself.

The wind was howling as a great lightning bolt encompassed the sky and earned an all consuming roar from the deep sky. A fire started somewhere in the building, and the wind picked up mighty pieces of the burning debris and sucked it into the tornado. The all mighty tornado hovering in the sky with all four elements blundering inside. The tornado came at me full force and I awoke with a rattling shake.

"Kristen, wake up. It's seven thirty, you're gonna be late to school!" I groaned as I realized that I had been asleep since three the previous afternoon. How had I slept for sixteen hours with no one waking me? I rushed into then bathroom and started brushing my teeth when I realized something strange on my wrist. My right wrist. The one Devin held onto longer.

The fingerprints where he held on to me so tightly to keep me from being sucked away were now blistering and turning a deep shade of grotesque purple. The day before they were barely light pink. How had they become so inflamed? The dream. It must've made me do it to myself. Dreams do crazy shit to people sometimes. But there was still a lingering thought in the back of my head. What if it wasn't just my dreams that were crazy?