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01 | History On Loop

PART ONE

I'm in the woods. Someone's chasing me. Twigs and leaves beneath my feet crunch with my every step. My legs are burning hotter than a fire. I've been running for a long time.

A tree collapses a few feet ahead of me, and I'm running so fast I can't stop. One of the bigger branches digs into my flesh on my left leg, and I scream out in pain. Except it isn't my voice I hear. It's someone else's. A figure advances towards me with a gun in his hand. "This is for the sins you've committed. Whose lives you have hijacked. You don't deserve to be in this world," says the man. He lunges toward me to place the gun at my head. That's when I wake up. Every time.

My clock reads 4:30 am. Ugh. I did it again and woke up too early. I've been having the same nightmare every night for a month where the same guy tries to kill me. Or whoever I am in the dream. I always wake up right before I see his face. It's almost boring at this point.

Today is the first year of senior year. The last year of high school. I'd say I can't wait, but I've been dreading this year all my life. I just turned 18 a month ago, so I'm supposed to go out and explore the world for myself now.

I've been living with my aunt, Sandy, all my life. She took me in as a baby after both of my parents died. My dad was murdered only four months after I was born. They never found his body. Sandy said my mom killed herself. It was something about the "mistakes my father made" that apparently made her do it.

School starts at 8:30....4 hours away. I could go back to sleep to the same horrid nightmare, or I could take a peaceful shower while listening to Ed Sheeran. I'll take the latter.

It's funny, really, how fast time passes because when I step out of the shower it's 5:30. Either my clock skipped forward an hour or I just take long showers. Pretty sure I take long showers. Really long showers. By the time I get dressed, it's 6:30. I guess it's a good thing that I didn't wake up at 7:45 like most mornings because it isn't long until I hear my aunt yelling at my cousin, Aiden, who is practically my brother, to get his butt out of bed.

I go to school at Dover High. I went to Dover Middle and before that, Dover Elementary. It's a small town, so small that everything is named after Dover Brighton, a police captain who caught a serial killer that was terrorizing our town in the late 1880s. Our town was renamed Bright Town in 1892. Whoever decided to rename it thought they were really clever. I've always thought it was stupid. I'd say it's probably just me, but everyone else feels the same way.

Dover High is a good school. The past three years have been for me, anyway. We're not exactly on the Top Ten Schools in Connecticut list, but we have pretty good test grades and GPAs. One of my best friends, Noah Parker, was valedictorian last year while my other bestie, Sage Stone, was salutatorian. They've been competing for the top spot in our class for years now. Outside of school, they're two peas in a pod, but in school, it's game on. All three of us have been best friends since the 6th grade. Noah had just moved into mine and Sage's neighborhood, and his house was infested with termites just a week later. I was sleeping over at Sage's house when his family rang the doorbell and asked if they could stay at Casa de Sage for the night. That was the night all of us hit it off and became best friends for life. Even when Noah's family had to move out permanently because of the termites, we hung out every weekend. But as we got older, hormones got to us. Sage and I found guys who seemed perfect for us. We had and still have two different styles of confronting people we like. Sage is smart, but she's not nerdy, she's headstrong. Sophomore year she went right up to her crush, Nick Nixon, a blonde haired blue eyed angel, and told him she had a thing for him. Turns out Nick Nixon is a blonde haired blue eyed devil straight from hell. He laughed right in Sage's face when she asked him out. She told me what happened, cried for only 10 minutes, then moved on. The next day she told me she had eyes for James Johnson, a quiet, hazel-eyed, varsity basketball player. He was one of the good ones. He was one of those guys that's funny but hides it, smart but is afraid to show it, and is oblivious to how hot he is. I was so in love with him. But Sage asked him out a week later and broke up with him 2 months after their first date. Said she liked bad boys better. That's when I told her about my feelings for James. And just my luck, he moves away just as the sophomore year ended. Now she obsesses over my love life trying to find my next "James Johnson".