In Dead Men's Shoes

Chapter 6

Forget.

Forget about all of it. It's all over.

Catalina's eyes met mine, her icy, piercing gaze completely unblinking,

"It's over," she said.

I woke up in a cold sweat, my layers of blankets feeling suddenly suffocating. My digital alarm clock cast a green glow onto my bed: 3:09 am.

I pulled off all my sheets, as afraid as I was, and padded into my kitchen to get a glass of water. My throat was too parched to let me go thirsty. Every shadow seemed to jump out at me, every dark corner threatening to ambush me. But I retreated to bed without receiving any surprise attacks, and lie back down, trying to ignore the eerie darkness of the night by covering my head with a comforter. Despite the active nervousness coursing through my veins, a deep fatigue overtook me and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

Weeks passed, and I settled into another year of high school and lacrosse, and, in a desperate attempt to forget about Catalina, I threw my focus into getting good grades, getting physically strong, and joining the drama club. I was not an actress by any means, but I at least took on the task with full vigor. The only problem with all of this was that, like I had assumed, Catalina and I had many classes together. I was plagued by not only lingering fear from the incidents of months past, but also by loneliness.

Catalina and I had been best friends, known for constantly being together. For the past couple of years, it seemed like we saw each other every day, or at least texted every day. I had known her inside and out, and if there was something I didn't know, well, I would know that, too. But now, I was forced to watch as Catalina made other friends, joked with other people, laughed uncontrollably, the way only I used to be able to make her laugh. I, on the other hand, was not like Catalina. I wasn't a cheery ray of sunshine, and did not attract new friends so easily. She had always been an unfaltering beacon in my life, but without her presence, there was not a soul I felt so close to. Yes, I could talk to Emma from lacrosse, and Andrew in drama club had been nice to me since I joined, but none of them were Catalina. None of them were my confidant, my jester, my other half. Ever since that fateful August, I felt this odd, unwhole feeling tugging at me, going into junior year without the girl I spent nearly all of my days with, without my favorite person in the world. But it was a different kind of loneliness when Catalina was right there in front of my eyes, acting as though I didn't exist. The pain hit on a whole new level knowing that my best friend sat inches from me every day in class, the girl I knew so well, and yet I could no longer as much as make eye contact with her. She turned her back on me whenever I even dared to glance in her direction. She grinned at other people like they had gifted her the sun. I didn't even try to talk to her. It felt hopeless to approach the girl who was once my best friend. She was an unfaltering wall of stone.

I convinced myself I wasn't lonely by spending lunches in the band room, staying after school for drama, and practicing lacrosse on the weekends. But when I retreated home from my full days of activity, I had nobody to text, nobody to get coffee with, nobody to study with. Loneliness showered my brain like a constant rain cloud dampening even my happy thoughts, of which there were few. With every passing day I had to go to school and see Catalina avoid me, I grew more and more lonely. The most amount of time I ever met her eyes was in my dreams, and even then they were not her own. They were darker, colder, more hollow every time.

It was a frigid, arid Friday, and I sat on the edge of the stage in the drama room, fidgeting with the buttons on my shirt. The one radiator in the room did little to warm up any of us, and we all stood around instead of practicing, the cold casting a lazy mood on everybody.

"Hey, everything okay?" Andrew asked, approaching me, his curly hair today a messy mop atop his head. "You look kinda... down."

A twisted laugh bubbled out of me at the causal way he phrased it, as if I hadn't been struggling for months on end.