Never Fated To Be |✅|

Chapter 15 : Enter, Loss

Tolerate another weird guy? I couldn't.
But I had to anyway.

Luke was definitely strange. Very strange. He had this thing about him that I just couldn't figure out. He hung around Jake the rest of the day and made it impossible for me to go near him. And ironically, he appeared exactly at the moments when I tried to ask Jake about the meet after school and how Zayla had behaved when I had brought up the talk about going to visit her grandma's shop.

For the first few instances, I had shrugged it off thinking them to be coincidences and co-related it to the fact that Jake's friends had perfect timings. All popular boys were probably the same. But when it continued for the entire day, I just couldn't help but  think otherwise. Maybe it was just me, but I think Luke had found out that Jake was hiding something from him. And I knew that Jake wasn't gonna reveal anything without telling me about it.

Moreover, I really wanted to ask Jake about the fact that he had never told me he had a person whom he considered his best friend. And also that other thing about me and him being . . . close. I rolled my eyes at my own thought.

The school day soon came to an end and the moment finally arrived for Jake, Zayla and me to head over at Donna's Collectibles. I had been eager about it the whole time. Yet, I had the feeling that something was going to be wrong. A feeling like I was going to be rejected, disappointed. I didn't know why I felt like it, but I did. And I was starting to panic because of that.

When I was leaving my last class for the day and heading over to my locker, the haunting visions reappeared.

The students all around the place seemed to disappear. Everything became darker. The walls started closing in on me and the ceiling descended lower as if an earthquake had rattled the bricks of which it was made of. The air carried the smell of blood once again and I was starting to suffocate.

My bag started to feel heavy, like all the world's adversities had been accumulated and now was locked inside of its grey chains. My head started to spin and my palms started to sweat. The unwanted strength of the illusions was so overpoweringly strong that I was getting crushed underneath it. I couldn't figure out how it was happening or why it was happening.

I wanted to scream but I couldn't. Everything around me had disappeared now and there was only a black barrier all around me. I was starting to lose awareness when suddenly those atrocious dolls swayed past my gaze. They had seemed so different, and so much better, in my dream at Jake's house. They looked so horrifying now that I wanted to strike each one against their heads.

They were back to how they had been and tauntingly sang their strain again. But their song was different this time,
Oh Valerie, how pitiful are you! You kill others, but you won't die.
Yet, Valerie how dreary of you! You were never close, neither were you far.
You're gonna lose it. You're gonna lose.

I covered my ears and slammed my eyes shut. I wouldn't listen to them. They were just gonna mislead me towards depression again. And I didn't want that to happen now that I had a little bit of new hope.

My voice welled up inside my throat until I was choking. I started coughing violently. The beasts of those dolls laughed and mocked at me. I clutched my stomach and crashed to the ground. Their laughter started to fade away, and the next moment they were gone. The darkness around me cleared, I entered the light of reality again. My vision cleared slowly and the school corridors along with the students reappeared. The choking feeling was still stuck in my windpipe even though I was breathing like I was asthmatic and I had just finished running a five kilometer race in that condition.