Shadows of a Past

3.5K 223 59
                                    

No one came to the door.

Lisa and Jennie stood before it, silent on the doorstep, waiting. Waiting for something. Lisa didn't know exactly what. She didn't think Jennie knew either, but still, they waited, breathing in unison. Anxiety fluttered through Lisa's veins.

"No one's going to answer," she said finally, her shoulders slumping, either in relief or disappointment.

There might be something they needed inside the house, something Jennie needed. She must have known this place. It felt like a familiar place. Not familiar to Lisa, but familiar to Jennie, like Lisa could feel it through her.

Lisa shook her head, stepping back from the door. Maybe she'd just started thinking like Jennie after spending so much time with her.

"Do you remember this place?" Lisa asked. She turned to where Jennie had been standing at her side a moment before and found only air. "...Jennie?"

Suddenly, Lisa was alone on the doorstep of the eerie house.

She shuffled back, nearly tripping with her own shoelaces. It wasn't that Lisa was scared of the house or what was inside it, it was just... she had to find Jennie.

Calling Jennie's name softly, as if she might disturb the person who was apparently not home, Lisa checked the obvious places – in the tree by the side of the house, on the sidewalk next to the trashcans, by the garden befriending the weeds.

Jennie was nowhere to be seen. Lisa's heart caught in her chest. She looked around at the bare front yard, anxious.

The house couldn't take Jennie away from her. She couldn't lose Jennie again just when she'd been about to get the answers to all her questions. There was no point in finding out about Jennie's past if Jennie wasn't there in the present.

It was just a house.

A hand clenched around Lisa's wrist and Lisa yelped.

Jennie watched with calm brown eyes and Lisa sighed, tension releasing from her shoulders immediately. She slung her free arm around Jennie's waist, pulling her closer for a short moment. "Don't leave me like that," Lisa admonished.

"You have it backwards," Jennie told her. When she smiled it didn't look happy.

"What?" Lisa asked, furrowing her eyebrows worriedly. Jennie ignored her question as Jennie often did.

"Come on," Jennie said instead, bumping her nose against Lisa's cheek before dragging Lisa after her. She led Lisa down the side of the house, past an open fence.

It reminded her of the place Jennie had lived, crawling through a hole in the fence, crawling through a window to a condemned building where she slept.

A shiver struck Lisa at the thought, the person who she had come to care for more than anything, living in that place by herself.

It only made Lisa dislike this house more.

They stopped at a high window. Jennie poked the screen with a testing finger, looking to Lisa proudly.

"No," Lisa said immediately. "No. Nope. Bad idea."

The glass pane of the window was open, only a screen and a small jump keeping them out of the house. Jennie tugged at the edge of the screen.

"Jennie," Lisa protested, embarrassed to find her voice came out high and whiney. She wrapped her hand around Jennie's arm to stop her when Jennie tugged harder on the screen. "You can't just go crawling through people's windows."

Jennie pulled the screen out of the window one-handed. "I can, though," she pointed out as Lisa stared.

"That was way too easy for you," Lisa said, frowning. The screen lay innocently at her feet. It seemed confused at the turn of events as well.

Through Her Eyes (JenLisa)Where stories live. Discover now