Christinellia

Chapter 4 - An Alternate Life

Chapter 4 – An Alternate Life

(Gary)

It was an alternating feeling of fear and excitement that flowed throughout my pale-skinned body.  The scary feeling of the unknown penetrated the core of my paranoid brain.

What does that mean when a girl asks to meet with you at a cemetery? 

Yes, it sounds absurd.  It sounds like a start of a terrible prank.  Good thing we’re past that.  Fortunately, this cemetery isn’t just an ordinary cemetery for me or for her.  This place is part of a significant event in my existence.  This location is where I received my second life.  This is where Christine Casingham came and saved me from a horrid death.  This is the flagship of her remarkable heroism.  This is where she chose me over her –douche of a guy– boyfriend.

I stood at the middle of the cemetery.  The freezing breeze of mid-afternoon air continued to cloak me as I shiver alone at an eerie location.  She’s ten minutes late as always.  My feelings at this moment juggle between anticipation and anxiousness.  ‘Will we or won’t we’ was the bigger question.  But I was feeling good about it.  The same way I felt for that night twelve years ago. 

Without her on sight, I reminded myself a story both tragic and romantic. 

It was seven thirty and I was seventeen then when I first encountered death.  Unlike today, the air was freezing and even with the thick clothes that I wore, it pushed through.  The place was filled with different shapes and sizes of gravestone, many creepy looking when it hides in darkness.  The moon was at its fullest and clouds were scarce.  The sky felt ominous.  I was simply beside the main road which made me feel more assured for my safety.  She’s late as usual.  We talked about meeting at seven and after thirty minutes, still no show.  But I vowed to myself one thing.

“I will wait here until midnight to prove to myself that you’re not the same girl I knew,” I told myself the moment we ended our phone conversation just after I invited her.  My brother suggested such thing.  ‘You talk to her.  Tell her that you’re done with what you’re doing and you just want to move on. You will not make her feel incompetent.  She will not make you feel more insecure.’  It was a longer speech and I decided to take the advice just to prove my brother wrong.  Clearly I was crazy trying to turn a reconciliation meeting into a stupid experiment.  But I will not go home until I prove myself right.  I wasn’t expecting a miracle because I know that that’s what it takes to fix this.

Time walked by faster and faster even if there wasn’t anything to do.  Probably my mind continued to write the speech I will both give to Christine and my brother showing them how wrong they are.  Now, I felt silly realizing that I didn’t come here to reconcile.  I came here prove that Christine will never look back thus proving myself to be correct. 

Just before eight, a black SUV drove by.  When I realize that it was Dave’s car, one of James friends who I had a clash with that week, he stopped.  Few seconds later, Dave, Martin, and Richard walked out the vehicle and headed towards me.  They were tall –six, six-two, and five-eleven, very bulky and intimidating bodies, great athletes, and they all have angst against me.  They tried bullying one of my friends so I humiliated them by proving them idiots.  It was a riot of a laugh and they walk out without a comeback.  So they swore revenge.  I didn’t expect that this would happen.

“Why are you alone at this location,” Dave said with a confident smirk on his face.  “What?  You waiting for death?”

I wasn’t in the mood but I responded with the least enthusiasm.  “Well yeah.  Death actually called me and he said that he’d come by to take the rest of your brains.  He’s not much in a hurry though since there aren’t much left.”