The house no one Knows about

EPILOGUE

You have no idea how much fun it is to visit a pawn shop. We split the "treasure". I took half to one pawn shop and she took the other half to a different pawn shop so we wouldn't look mysterious; two kids holding a bag full of twenty-four gold bars and several other things that would cost seventy-thousand dollars and above. We pawned everything and the money we got from both halves was five million, two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I kissed her forehead and jumped into my Ferrari 458 Italia and she got into her Cadillac Escalade and we departed. Two directions, one destination. In the end we did play basketball and I won but it was a good game 64-60. Izzy's beach house was huge and glamorous but more than anything it was luxurious. On New Year's Day we went to Disneyland in Orlando because every dying kid always wants to go to Disneyland and Bambi declared that she was a dying kid I guess a very chilly month wasn't on my list of things to expect but it came anyways, in January.

As the cold settled in she began to speak less. It went from really loud, goofy conversations to half-whispers and then one day we started fighting again. She would walk in and start yelling at me for little things such as leaving the toilet seat up and watching too much TV. She claimed that I frustrated her and I was so annoying but I ignored it because I knew she was depressed again. Afterwards she just stopped talking to me. We would walk past each other in complete silence. Then she apologised but I knew something was wrong because she apologised in her English accent and she continued to speak like that. Sometimes, I would catch her talking to herself; talking about her childhood in England and her posh, private school and how America killed her parents. She told me that the year, her parents decided to move to America and expand their business there was the year they died.

She became sick again and though I begged her several times to go to the hospital; she refused to listen to me. She wanted to die. She got very irritated and annoyed and started crying. Her excuse was that she did not trust Miami doctors. She gave me instructions on her death because she expected to die soon. She told me to wait for the day that I place her lifeless body into the ground and dump dirt on it. If I'm fairly honest, we were waiting for one of two scenarios; a) We'll get caught- the police will drag the both of us to jail in handcuffs and Bambi will for sure get a life sentence b) Pyroflu will get her first.

I think the best way to describe what happened to her is that she blocked happiness from uplifting her. She waited at the bus stop for death to come pick her up. She gave up on her dream to live to be twenty-four, she said it was pointless and stupid and she was never going to live that long. That's why she didn't celebrate her seventeenth birthday. She was dumbfounded about why she was still alive, she never stopped speaking in her English accent so I knew she was still far from normal.

She started coughing a lot especially when she spoke. I knew that this was one of the final stages of Pyroflu; Haemoptysis. She refused to do anything about it, so coughing blood became a normal thing for the both of us. She thought it freaked me out so she started drinking red wine and the colour of her mouth was permanently red.

She died the day after she turned eighteen. Three days before she died she refused to speak to me directly; she just spoke about what she wanted to say then jumped into one of her childhood memories. The week before she died she started taking pictures again and took many of herself; claiming that they were for me. She took pictures of just about anything and many of them didn't make sense; she took many pictures of the two of us together but she stopped taking pictures two days before she died. The night before she died, on her eighteenth birthday, I gave her a ring. It was an engagement ring. I proposed to her because I didn't want her to die before she got to experience that moment.

She loved the ring.

It was a seven-hundred dollar ring from Kay Jewellers. We had been sleeping in separate rooms for a long time but she came into my room that night and wrapped her arm around my shoulders.

'You've been taking care of me for so long at least let me feel like I can take care of you' she said

She dyed her hair brown on her seventeenth birthday and since then it has looked gorgeous. She massaged my head and told me tales of her fascinating robberies, and then I fell asleep. When I woke up and opened my eyes I saw her standing at the window. She was watching a shooting star move past and I remember wondering what's she wishing for? She was wearing a black GAP t-shirt. I remember the colour of her panties because they were the colour of her blood. She coughed some more and I closed my eyes. How did I miss the extreme shivering? Or the red eyes from crying?

I woke up to find her body on the floor. Normally, when you find a dead body on the floor, their blood would also be on the floor. Pyroflu gives its victims Haemoptysis and leaves their blood in their mouths and their skin colder than a normal dead body. I packed up everything in under five minutes, and then I called for a housekeeping service to fix up the place. They took ten minutes. I wiped up the blood on her chapped lips and texted a big thank you to Izzy. Then I drove back to her house in Charlotte. I made sure that a headstone was made for her. I buried her right next to her parents and stuck the headstone into the pile of dirt that covered her body.

R.I.P

MERCEDES (BAMBI) MERVEILLE KINGMAN

1998-2016

Then I went back to my parents' house, it was still in the same place. They cried a lot and turns out they were prepared to kill themselves if I didn't return. They apologised for everything but I wasn't prepared to go back to the life we lived before. We moved to Scotland. I saw it as a peaceful place, and a chance for new beginnings so why not? I finished my sister's book and it became a bestseller and every once in a while I go to visit Bambi's grave. I place a piece of Styrofoam that has been cut and painted to look like a chocolate-covered strawberry on her grave because I know how much she loved them.

I returned to Izzy's beach house four months after she died because I knew that her camera was still there and I wanted to keep that. There, I saw a sticky note taped to the bed and a picture. It was the sketch of me and my sister at the beach, she had finished it before she died but I never saw it. On the sticky note it said: Open if you've published His Mistake.

I flipped the note around to read the rest.

If you actually finished it and you're not just being eager to read this, I want you to know that the wish I made on that shooting star was so you would finish the book and it would become a bestseller.

And that was the first time I cried for Bambi.

Author's note

The disease Pyroflu is not real and no treatments or form of medication exist for it. However, Haemoptysis is very real.

This story wasn't written by me. It was written by my school daughter, Naomi Madu, age 13. Its pretty shocking, I know, I love her so much and want to appreciate her work by publishing it for her. That's basically the only person I'm giving all the thanks to. Hope you enjoy. You'll be seeing more from us.