Rag Doll

Chapter 2

I walked through the empty hallway to the stairs.

I jogged up the stairs and went into my bedroom. I kicked my wet shoes off and threw them in the pile of clothes on the floor.

I looked through my backpack for any homework. I realized I had none and breathed a sigh of relief. It was the first weekend all year without any assignments.

I took off my glasses and pulled out my laptop. I waited for it to start up and looked around the room. There wasn’t much in my room. It was just a few pictures of places and former pets of mine, none of my pets lasted very long in this house.

The laptop fired up and I signed in. I went straight for Facebook, my home on the internet.

I signed in and started scrolling through posts. I saw a few funny posts and a few sad or stupid posts, but just one stood out to me.

There was a post with a photo of me. It looked like the photo was taken without me noticing. The background was the school’s brick wall, and I was walking towards home.

I read what the post said, This girl is a murderer. Please believe me. She went crazy and killed her parents. If you see her, run away, you could be next.

 I finished reading the post and reported the person who posted it, some guy named The Fake Name Guy. Pathetic much?

I looked at some of my Facebook friend’s pages. I was a little saddened to see that half of them unfriended me. I looked at their pages to see that they had reposted the photo of me.

Come on, would I be a murderer? I know I repel people, but that doesn’t mean I’m a crazy person who killed her parents.

I closed the laptop and went into the kitchen. I grabbed some bread and lunch meat and made myself a turkey sandwich.

I went into the living room and turned on the TV. I turned on Discovery Channel and watched some two hour show about catching crabs in some sea in Alaska.

It ended and the next show didn’t seem that interesting. I turned the TV off and went into the basement to grab some food for dinner.

I walked over to the shelves full of food and picked out some instant rice mix. I turned to walk back up the steps and was met with a grey cat on the stairs.

By now I realized the cats and mice weren’t real, but the hallucinations were getting even more real and this one spooked me for a second.

The cat crawled up the stairs and disappeared into the hallway. I followed it up and turned the corner to find it was pawing at a photo of my parents.

It started scratching at the glass of the frame and it made this awful noise. I watched the cat swing at the photo and it almost fell off the wall.

I kept telling myself it wasn’t real, the photo was fine and the cat wasn’t there. The cat gave another swipe at the photo and it fell off the hook. It fell to the floor and glass went everywhere.

I walked up to the edge of the mess and looked for the cat. He had vanished.

I knew it wasn’t happening, this wasn’t really there. I picked up a shard of glass. It slipped and I cut my hand. Real blood came out of the wound.

I looked back at the mess, expecting it to be gone, disappeared like the cat. But it was still there, all of it.

I put the rice on the counter next to me and went and grabbed the broom and dust pan. I swept up the mess that was clearly real and put it into the garbage.

I looked around one more time for the cat and found nothing, not a hair. I was pretty spooked out by now.

I grabbed the photo of my parents off the floor and put it on the table. I realized there were scratches on the photo, proof that the cat was here.

This was the first time one of my hallucinations did something that stayed done. Usually they broke something, then it would be gone in a second, still whole and where it should be.

I made the rice and ate very little of it. I put the rest in the fridge and watched some more TV. It was getting to be around eleven O’clock, so I decided it was time to go to bed.

I worked my way up the stairs to my room and slept in my clothes. I was too caught up in thought to sleep, so I just sat there in the dark and wondered about the cat and the photo.