Hell On Earth

five | the place i'll be avoiding

I'm standing outside the classroom door, still unsure what I'm going to do about Luke.

Like, what am I supposed to do?

Talk to him?
Hell to the no. Do you recall that would be a death sentence?

Ignore him?
He saved my life. I don't want to pretend that never happened.

You see my dilemma?

Ashton shoved me through the door before her and Lee.
"Ash!" I exclaim, stumbling in an effort to catch myself. She just shrugs innocently and strides past me.
Oh no she didn't.
I scan the classroom to find Luke absent.

Well, that works too.

Does it?
I'm not entirely sure.

Luke wasn't there the rest of the day either.

I also snapped at seven more people of the course of the day, including Ashton, Zoe, and five more people who wanted to know what happened to me.
The anger went away almost immediately after every incident.

I still don't know why.

Ashton dropped an angry and confused me off at Starbucks instead of home.

Home wasn't an option anyway.

Ashton had offered to let me stay with her until my house was reconstructed, and I did accept, but my nights there were plagued with visions of flashes of red, thrones of darkness, flickering fires, a smile too wide to be human, and - most sinister of all - a deep, evil, echoing laugh that sent chills down my spine.

When I asked Ashton about the laughing, she didn't hear it.

Long story short, I didn't sleep.

At all.

I take a sip of my hot chocolate, the warm cocoa warming me up, my hands protected by the sleeves of my hoodie.
Ash would pick me up later, to take me back to her house, but I wanted to work on homework.
Alone.

I finish math and mythology too quickly, leaving me staring at the overload of english packets and assignments in my binder.

The sooner it's done, the sooner I can relax, I remind myself.

With a sigh, I pull the first packet out of my binder and get started.