Coffee's For Closers (And Also Romantics)

Chapter 5: Cheryl

Cheryl was scrolling through her camera roll... again. There were over seven thousand pictures for her to look through, and she was slightly ashamed to admit that she had seen them all at least twice in the last two days.

She wasn't sure why she kept going back, why she kept thinking about her old life. All she wanted to do was forget what had happened, but all she kept doing was bringing her pain into sharper focus.

Selfies of herself and with her friends, photos of places and aesthetics that she had later edited and posted on Instagram, screenshots of funny texts and articles from online...

She both thanked and cursed herself for keeping record of so many details of her life. She didn't want to remember them now, but she couldn't give them up.

Cheryl finally clicked her phone off and laid back on her bed. It wasn't even noon yet, but she just wanted this day to be over. She had woken up in a funk, a cloud of sadness and remembering and missing everything she had lost. If only she could lose these bad feelings too.

She sat up slowly and looked around her room, restless as ever. Though there was nothing to look at- the bedroom was exactly the same as it had been for the past four days.

She couldn't stay in here any longer. Cheryl was going to go crazy, just sitting in this room all day. She really hadn't explored much of the house at all since they had first arrived, mostly because she didn't want to risk running into her mother.

She wasn't scared of her mother. Her mother couldn't control her life. Cheryl was simply... indifferent. And because she was indifferent and much too busy to be bothered with her mother's negativity, she always thought it best to actively avoid her.

But it was high time she saw the rest of the house that she now lived in. As she left her room, she remembered coming out into the hall last night, listening for some weird creaking noise she'd thought she had heard, but obviously there hadn't been anything there. She would have to get used to this old house and the noises it made in the night.

She walked down to the end of the hall without opening any of the doors- she already knew they were just empty bedrooms and closets. The landing at the top of the staircase stretched past the her hallway on both sides, leading off to different halls and different rooms.

She randomly chose to go to her left, and walked that way in silence. She passed two more halls that she found, after quick inspection, were just more bedrooms.

After a few more minutes of searching she had found two big sitting rooms, four walk in closets, seven bathrooms, and several more bedrooms. They were all empty and in desperate need of life. Cheryl wondered what they were ever going to do with the space. They had lived in a penthouse back in Seattle that was made perfectly for a high-class family of four, but this place could almost be a hotel.

She went back to the staircase and climbed up to the third, and top, floor. This floor was open and airy, with huge windows looking out over the land on all sides. There weren't many walls, or hallways, that separated these rooms.

She wandered from space to space, trying to imagine what it had been like here a hundred years ago. This floor was where parties had been held, guests had mingled, and people had spent their day in leisure.

Cheryl entered a room bigger than any other she had come across before. The hardwood flooring made the room echoey, and it was empty save for the biggest, most intricate chandelier Cheryl had ever seen. And Cheryl had seen a lot of chandeliers in her life.

She cautiously walked into the room, her sandaled feet hardly making a sound. She stopped when she was directly underneath the chandelier and lifted her head to stare at it.