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WHEN SAWYER WAKES from a dreamless sleep, the room is still bathed in darkness. Shadows pulse in the sounds of the night, steady as a heartbeat. Around her, her roommates are still fast asleep and snoring. Through blurry eyes, she squints out the window to an unknown hour of the sky.
Sawyer yawns. A mistake, she realises too late, as a bolt of white-hot pain tears through her busted bottom lip like lightning. As the metallic tang of blood seeps into her tongue, yesterday's fight comes back in reluctant bits. Bits and pieces. Shards that cut through her brain in flashes. Fists cracking against bone. Black-out knives of rage slicing up her insides. Explosions of pain. All the blood on her knuckles, spraying from Leo Chapel's mouth, slipping in-between her teeth. The soft roar of: you are alive. Then, Wyatt restraining her. Her veins prickle. One more thing he'll have the upper hand on. Not that she's ever had many experiences being the bigger person.
Had she felt any remorse at all? Sawyer swallows down the bitter lump. She doesn't remember. She doesn't know if she wants to remember. Doesn't know if it's better that she did and just doesn't recall the guilt echoing in her footsteps or if she didn't at all. Sometimes it's better not to know.
Lying in the dark, in the cold draft cloying in the frigid air, Sawyer blinks back the sticky tears that'd sprung to her eyes. She inhales slowly, untangling herself from the sheets swamping her legs and the groggy nebula weighing down her skull with jerky, mechanical movements.
Despite the protest in her aching muscles, she gets out of bed and heads down to the communal bathroom with lead in her bones.
Flames flare to life on the torches mounted on the walls as she crosses over to the sinks with her toiletries in hand. Light spills across the tiles, and Sawyer meets her reflection's gaze behind the specks of dust and lipgloss stains in the grimy mirror. Reflection-Sawyer stares back, cold and vacant. Freckles dot her nose bridge, a boneyard of dead stars spreading across both cheeks like an oil spill. Under her red-rimmed eyes, dark bags sag her skin. Blemishes from the yesterday's brawl in the stairwell are smeared across her skin too. Greenish bruises smudged over her jaw, around the cut above her left eyebrow, the blood crusted on her split lip.
Shadows dance over the hollows of her washed-out complexion in the flickering torchlight. Sawyer musters a smile, watches as her reflection does the same, but it looked painfully superficial and more like she was just baring her teeth. Her smile collapses and she's back to an empty void and a throbbing bottom lip.
What's wrong with you? She asks the mirror, even if she already knows the answer that'd bounce off the glass.
What's wrong with you? her reflection throws the question back with an accusatory scowl. Only fifteen but you'd rather be dead, and you are already halfway there. Your shadow's grown its own rows of monster teeth and you can't control what's in your blood. You don't care, you don't care, you don't care. How do you fool yourself for so long? You are not a house haunted by a ghost. You are a ghost haunted by a house.
