Tattooed Mistakes: Far From Over

Chapter 4

(We're almost at the end...)

Chapter 3 theme songs: What's Wrong With Me? from Mean Girls the Musical, Seventeen and Kindergarten Boyfriend from Heathers the Musical

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~ We both know you're cruel, and we both know you're right ~

Had it not been a Monday, and had he not needed to go to school, Alonzo probably would have avoided Zephyr the next day.

When he woke up, exhausted and groggy, he rubbed his eyes till they were sore, like it would remove the things he had seen the night before, but when he opened them he was startled at the sight he was met with. Out of the corner of his eye, in the mirror against the wall, he could still see his zombie-self looking back at him, just as blurry-eyed as he was. He jumped and scrambled back on his bed but a second look showed nothing but a perfectly ordinary reflection. No black veins, no slack jaw, no stiff movements, and a functioning Z-band secured to his wrist.

Regardless, he was shaken by the reappearance of the zombie and it took him a few minutes before he could even get out of bed. He didn't dare look back at the mirror.

He tried to act normal at breakfast, or at least as 'normal' as he had been acting since the incident, but Hazel obviously picked up on it. With a small sigh, she reached out and pushed the bowl of flesh flakes he had been nursing for the past five minutes away. He dropped his spoon on the table and the hand he had been resting his chin on followed it. He blinked and lifted his head just enough to meet his mother's eyes and cringed inwardly when he saw how worried she was.

"Honey, is there something wrong?"

He just barely managed to mumble, "Nightmares..." He absentmindedly rubbed at his eye again. He still couldn't decide if it really was a nightmare or not. Maybe a hallucination...? He didn't want to even suggest that it could be real.

Hazel paused, thinking.

"Do you want to stay home today?"

Yes.

"No," he forced himself to say, his voice a little rough but not too bad, "I'm fine. I'll forget it in, like, an hour."

"Are you sure?"

He nodded and Hazel reluctantly accepted. She did at least manage to make him promise he'd call her if anything happened, but soon Zephyr knocked on the door and Al could escape.

They walked hand-in-hand through Zombie Town; Alonzo never realised just how tight Zephyr's grip was when he was holding on just as tightly himself. They met up with Zach and Roz on the way but aside from giving them permission to talk about it, Al kept quiet as Zephyr and Zach filled Roz in on what she had missed. She offered him some reassurance but honestly, it was all in one ear and out the other. His mind was on other things.

He was like that the whole day, quiet and unresponsive, though that wasn't so out of the ordinary now. What was strange was that he was acting that way even with his friends, even with Zephyr, which made them all worry. When any of them tried to talk to him, he was completely lost in thought, and none of them could get him to explain.

Because it was too hard to explain that every time he saw his reflection, even just in the black screen of his Z-band, he was there. And even when he wasn't there, staring back at him from black-rimmed eyes, he could hear that low, guttural echo of his voice loud and clear in his head, telling him everything he was doing wrong, everything that would be easier without his Z-band, everything that would be fixed if he just gave up.