Waking up Blank [Published - sample only]

5: "Only the good die young."

I sat awkwardly on the sofa in Drake's basement. It had only been a few minutes ago that Jared and Andrew had come to pick me up, and come into the house with me. Drake had forgotten that I didn't remember anything when he had told me to make my way to the basement, and said that he'd bring the boys down as soon as they got everything for lunch. Which apparently meant food from the microwave, bottles of soda, and chips along with anything else they could carry. 

I guess he had decided I wouldn't be helpful since my own family had just gone over with me how to use the microwave and toaster in case I was hungry. Didn't seem hard, but then again I had accidentally set a pop tart on fire in the toaster yesterday morning. Needless to say I wasn't allowed to make food anymore.

The boys had left me behind, laughing about something, I think it was called Halo. Which left me to wonder around the house until I found what I believed to be the basement. I had only found it because Jared had come back and pointed me in the right direction before Drake called "lover boy" to come back into the kitchen. Jared glared in the direction Drake's voice had come from before showing me where to go. 

It felt foriegn to be here, but Jared and Andrew had insisted that Maddie and I practically lived here. Drake's parents were rarely home due to the jobs they had, which I couldn't remember right now so I wasn't sure what they did. It had become a sanctuary as Andrew called it, a place where we could go and hang out without having someone breathing down our necks all the time, but it was also where we got in a lot of trouble.

Andrew had been telling me the story of Maddie and I starting a prank war on Drake, and one day it went too far for Drake. We had come over an hour earlier than we said we would, picked the lock to his back door, and then gone upstairs. We had played it safe at first, taped streamers to his door for him to walk into when he woke up, but while I finished that Maddie went to his bathroom. She had sprayed some of his shaving cream on his mirror and sink, but she left it on the heater by accident, and it supposedly exploded. Then we continued, at one point we went to the basement and hide a lot of Drake's stuff, and it went down hill from there.

Drake had laughed off our first joke, but when he waked into the bathroom he was annoyed, but when he found us downstairs waiting on him and unable to find his stuff he got very angry. Maddie shrugged it off, and needless to say Drake only became angrier. She and I were stuck cleaning it while the boys went downstairs to help Drake look for his stuff.

"There she is!" a voice called, pulling me out of my thoughts. "Glad to see you found the basement, I was kind of worried when I couldn't hear the music going or the television. I thought you got lost," Drake joked as he came down with two plates in his hand. One had pizza and the other had the other had nachos, the only things I had managed to make before I was banned from the kitchen at home.

"Well you should have thought about that before you just told me to go into the basement," I joked. "What if I had gotten lost?"

"We would have sent Jared after you," Drake said smoothly as he placed the plates on the table in front of me. Jared came up behind him and hit him in the arm once he set down the 2 liter bottles of soda. Andrew wasn't far behind judging from the laughter I heard coming down the stairs. "What? You would've found her no problem!"

Jared didn't say anything as he took a seat next to me and turned on the television. He sat closer to me as the others joined us. Drake took the armchair next to me, and Andrew took the seat at the end of the sofa. They talked idly about video games I had never heard of, and other topics that I wasn't interested in, but I knew what they were doing. They were trying to make me feel normal, I was told we did this all the time, and they were hoping to jog my memory by acting like nothing had happened, but something had happened. Something awful had happened, and that left us one person short.