We Were Liars | ONC 2020 ✔

Bad Friend

TWO DAYS AFTER

This is so cliché.

Am I dead?

I'm still here, right?

My eyes flew open to the sight of a sterilised, white-walled room. The scent of medicine hung heavy in the air. It was cold, almost to the point of freezing. Wires encircled my arms, but I couldn't see much more than that. My glasses weren't on my face. There was someone sitting on a chair in the corner. It looked like my mother, but I couldn't be sure.

My hand reached out blindly, the movement slamming something against the steel pole next to my bed. The woman in the chair jolted up. I saw ash-blonde hair and worn wrinkles, confirming my suspicions. "Canterbury!" She rushed over to hug me. "You're alive! Oh, my poor baby, I'm so sorry!"

"I...what?" I knew I was in a hospital room, but I didn't know anything else other than that. My mother dug around in her purse, yanking out a pair of circle-framed, silver glasses. They weren't mine. I looked at her in quizzical confusion.

"Your...your old ones were lost when you were attacked. I bought you a temporary pair," she explained. I nodded my thanks, taking them from her and slipping them on. Almost immediately, the world came back into focus. I ran an inquisitive hand over my head. My hair had been cropped close to my scalp, a bandage wrapped around the back of it. I realised the absence of my bowtie with some mild shock. "I was worried you would never wake up!"

"I---what?" I repeated, confusion overriding my brain. Suddenly, it all came back to me in a flood: the library, my head injury, the kidnapping, the drive, the lake, the hand with the serpent tattoo, Avery Lang's corpse...

Ette.

Ette!

I bolted straight up in a panic, causing the machine next to me to start beeping insistently. A doctor rushed in, chastising me for sitting up so quickly as he rearranged my wires and tubes. "Where's Ette?" I demanded to know. My heart pounded in my chest. Surely my mysterious saviour had pulled him from the waters alive as well?

The grim look on my mother's face confirmed my greatest fear. "No," I whispered. The sense of loss hit me like a truck, crashing over me in a tidal wave of internal agony unlike anything I'd ever felt before. "NO!"

"Calm down," the doctor told me. "You're going to hurt yourself."

"He can't be dead, right?" I gasped, ignoring the doctor---which was unnatural for me, because I always listened to figures of authority.

My mother wouldn't meet my eyes. "They found both him and...what's her name? That popular girl, the pretty Asian one. The police found both of them in the lake." She swallowed. "Dead."

I looked down at myself. I could barely breathe. "How did I get here?"

Worry fluttering in her darting gaze, my mother said, "Someone---we don't know who---dropped you off in front of the hospital. You were unconcious. A little while after, there was an anonymous phone call made to the police station telling them to check the lake. They did. They're speculating that Ette and the girl went to the lake for a rendezvous, but they weren't sure how you fit into the picture."

My throat felt parched. "Please don't tell me they think I'm the murderer now."

My mother looked away, stare distant. "They'll take you in for questioning, but no. They don't think you did it. The lake's only a few kilometres from the school. They think you were just at the wrong place at the wrong time."

Hot tears were beginning to spill their way down my cheeks. The doctor finished his work on my wires and moved to the side, clipboard at the ready. "It's not like that," I cried. "They weren't there for a rendezvous. I...someone kidnapped me from outside the library. Ette came to find me. I don't know why Avery was there!" Deep in my bones, I knew that if Ette hadn't followed my kidnapper in his attempt to save me, he would still be alive.