𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀𝐆𝐀𝐈𝐍!

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝟖

"Bye! See you tomorrow!" she yelled at the two boys before turning around and continuing to walk away from the train station. Her arms filled with bags upon bags of things that she had bought that day. You could say she finally splurged ..... a lot.

Although, to be fair, most of the clothes were bought by Jeno and Renjun, with her money of course. In fact it came as a surprise to her when she saw that she still had over half of the money left, considering she could barely move her arms because of the weight of all the bags she had to carry home.

As she continued to walk, she watched the numbers of cars lessen the closer she got to her 'home'. It wasn't much of a home, especially not with the memories that the place held, which were, to say the least, bad. She watched the shadows of trees and overhanging branches turning into hands, clawing the pavement as they closed in around her, grabbing at her ankles.

As the top of the abandoned orphanage came into view, she felt all the memories and thoughts she always tried to block and push away flood back in. She rushed the rest of the way there, quickly opening the door, stepping inside and locking it behind herself before trudging across the cement floor, up the stairs and into the room right at the end of the long corridor. It was a good thing that the head nurse, from many years ago, had gotten solar panels that enabled the building to be well lit, without the need to pay for electricity.

She plopped down on the dusty, small mattress that lay in the room with a thin quilt laying, neatly folded, on top of it.

The mattress, however, did nothing to stop the chill from the cement floor reaching the girl that lay upon it. It didn't do anything to make her sleep any more comfortable than laying on the cement either. The quilt was also useless. It neither trapped heat, nor kept the cold out. The only reason she kept them was so that she could hold onto a little bit of normality. It was probably the closest thing she could get to being similar to other people her age. Not that she knew much about being a sixteen year old.

She stared up at her blank concrete ceiling. The eerie silence around her unable to stop the memories to flash in her mind, as they always did whenever she was alone. She saw the kids, her 'friends' laughing together as they kicked around a worn football. She saw the nurses watching the kids, smiling and laughing. She saw the way they cared for all the kids, treating them all equally.

So, what made her different from the others? What made the nurses despise her? What made all the kids run away from her? What made them lock her in her room almost everyday? What made them scowl? What made them push her around? What made them leave?

She only knew the answer to the last question. She remembered waking up around midnight, hearing people scurrying around outside, talking in hushed whispers. She remembered wondering what was happening as she pushed herself up, against her room door as she tried to find out why everyone was outside. She remembered trying the doorknob, finding it locked once again. She remembered sighing and shrugging it off as nothing, tucking herself back into bed and, eventually, dozing off once again.

She remembered waking up the next day, which actually happened to be her tenth birthday, to find the building completely silent, pressing her ear to the door to see if she could hear the kids who normally stayed in their rooms giggling, she couldn't. She remembered trying the doorknob and finding it open. She remembered running out with a large smile on her small face, thinking that they had let her out to celebrate her birthday, only to find the corridor empty, all the room doors open and the rooms themselves had nothing inside. She ran around the whole building to no avail, everyone was gone. Everything was gone. She was alone. Again.

Only a few months later did she find out that they had all moved to another, better building on the other side of town. That was also when she realised that they had all left her on purpose. She remembered catching one of the nurses eyes, and the ugly smirk that formed on the nurses face when she saw the tears welling up and dripping down from the ten year old's eyes. That was when Crystal vowed two things. One being to never let anyone in, to never let anyone see the real her, and the other being to never, ever let anyone see that they had upset her.

It was four more years until she met Renjun and Jeno. However, even though she knew that she could trust them and that they were sincere, she couldn't let them in. Not that they realised. They didn't know that she was an insomniac. They didn't know she had anxiety. They didn't know that she was depressed. They didn't know that she was suicidal. They weren't bad friends, no, she was just an amazing actor who had perfected her character, to the point that sometimes she'd forget about her true self, her sad, lonely, cutting, true self.