Unpredictable - (tristan evans)

Do You Want Me Dead?

When she got home it was pitch-black, the only light source a single weak beam of orange from a nearby lamp-post. Stepping into the eerily silent house, she sighed, and her breath blew out in a cloud of frosty white, raising a hand to press it against cool glass, mirror image. Her parents weren’t home. Typical. She laughed bitterly to herself, not that they ever cared about her anyway. To them she was just a waste of space, a stranger who bore no resemblance to either of them, inside or out. They were right about that, at least.

Struggling with the lock on the door, she didn’t bother with the light switch, just turned in the vague direction of the stairs and ran. She heard something crash behind her but didn’t slow, trying to find her door in the dark.

“Oh, fuck off”, she said spitefully to no-one in particular, edging carefully around the hazardously scattered objects littering her bedroom floor. Her voice sounded strange, cracking as if she hadn’t used it in a while. That was true, she didn’t try to talk to the people at school, and they couldn’t even be bothered to remember who she was. A shiver ran down her spine when she realised. It was as if she was dead, like she didn’t even exist in the first place. No, that wasn’t completely right, she shook her head, curling into a ball on her bed and snatching up her headphones. Someone had talked to her.

Why do you hate me? Those five words replayed in her mind, laced with venom and the barest hint of confusion. She remembered him walking away, remembered wanting to scream all the words she could never say to his face at his retreating back. Instead she roughly switched on her music, already at full volume, threw the window wide open and gratefully sank into blissful fabrication, everything drowned out in a sea of crashing sound.

* * *

He stared blindly through the haze of thick smoke winding through ink-stained fingers, opaque grey against deepest black, and the glowing end of his cigarette cast a weak orange light over his limp hand. He flicked it and sent ash swirling down to land on his wrist, smudging it into a slash of monochrome against porcelain skin. He groaned as he stood up, stretching his arms high above his head and ripped shirt clinging to his body as he took one last guilty drag before tossing it carelessly over his shoulder in the general direction of the ashtray, not bothering to watch where it fell. His small room was unusually neat, once you got past the stray bottles of pills, the heavy scent of smoke and mint. An odd mix, yet strangely seductive.

“Screw this”, he muttered to the listening shadows, leaving the apartment far behind him as he calmly walked out into the freezing night air. Gazing down at his hands, he saw the way the bones strained against paper-thin skin, and yet he couldn’t care less, whispering tendrils of his midnight tattoo unfolding across deep blue veins. He stuck to the trees as he walked and his eyes flashed deadly silver when he looked up into the light of the moon, cascading down his slim, empty body and outlining the gaunt shadows of his face. A few stragglers were out later than was normal, though they took one look at him, his hard-edged eyes that held secrets, silent shadows, the blackness that trickled down his left arm, his ripped clothes showing ghostly white skin, and almost ran in the opposite direction from him. And then they were gone. The night belonged to him. He laughed with no discernible trace of joy, shoving his hands deep in his pockets as he rummaged around for a spare cigarette, already missing the dulling sense of numbness it offered him, his sole sanctuary from the nightmare that was his reality.

He quickly fished one out from a corner of his jeans and fumbled with the lighter he always carried, hunching his figure around it against the icy breeze that threatened to blow out the tiny, bravely burning flame.

“Ow, shit!”, he shook his finger where the useless thing had scorched him, gingerly inspecting the reddening skin in the dim light before sucking it to try and ease the sting, still wincing now and again as he glanced around.

He pushed the cigarette back into his pocket with a grimace of disgust, still nursing his burnt finger. Not that he even liked smoking anyway. To him it was just another convenient way of escaping the sick joke otherwise labelled as life, the only friend he had ever had in this cold, cruel world where to love was to show weakness, and showing weakness got you killed. He leaned back against a nearby lamp-post, the only one that actually worked in the whole street, and a low hiss escaped his lips when the freezing metal brushed his sensitive skin. He absently reached up to fiddle with the cold ring piercing his lower lip and, standing there, illuminated in the small circle of light, he realised he could hear music.

It was quiet but definitely there, as though someone had their headphones in but was playing their music so ear-splittingly loud that it leaked into tainted air. His curiosity piqued, he carelessly scanned the row of houses though all seemed to be dark, scarily silent. No wonder, it was 1:03AM after all. Suddenly he recognised the song, and for some unknown reason a face formed in his mind, as clearly as if he had spent his whole life staring at it.

That girl, the one he’d sat beside in class yesterday just because some idiot had broken his chair the class before. He’d simply shrugged and flung a glare round the classroom that froze fear and left the guilty shaking behind their bags before slouching over to the only other free seat he could see. Sitting down reluctantly, he expected to be stared at for the whole lesson by yet another brainless slut, but this one was different. At first she hadn’t even seemed to notice his presence, though he didn’t miss the obvious shock on every other face in the classroom. Even the teacher stumbled for a moment in his lecture before shaking his head in confusion and carrying on bravely, dutifully ignoring the fact that most of the kids weren’t even paying attention. Not that they ever did anyway.

He remembered glancing at her from the corner of his eye, hearing the faint click of a stud against her teeth and noticing the way her hands had clenched in her lap. He never missed a thing.

And then suddenly she had looked at him, glared at him, an unforgiving anger in his eyes that he couldn’t understand. Usually girls were curious, admiring, annoyingly invading, but never furious the way she was. He almost shivered, and a flash of fear flickered deep in his mind though he had quickly thrust it aside. To show fear was to show weakness.

But what if he wanted to get killed?

In a haze of dull pain and wandering thoughts he stumbled home just as the comforting darkness gave way to a bright light that hurt his eyes, the first wary streaks of dawn braving an endless canvas of sky just waiting to be painted on. He spent a long time thinking, that day.

But try as he might, he could not remember her name.

i actually like this chapter, so hi i'm updating at 1:30 am

feel free to vote and comment your thoughts yeah

thanks for reading, i'll see you at chapter 4 x