𝐒𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐄𝐍

𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕡𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕠𝕟𝕖

 You woke up with a jolt, sitting upright and gasping for breath. It felt like you had been electrocuted in your sleep. But your night terrors always made you feel like that. You had them almost every night since the massacre that took place in your hometown. Lately, though, it seemed as if they were somehow getting worse every day leading up to Halloween; the second anniversary of the event.

The night terrors usually consisted of vivid memories from that night in the Macher house. For hours at a time, you would be forced to relive every single slash of the knife, every last choked scream, every splatter of blood. Unless someone woke you up prematurely, they usually lasted right until the moment your alarm began blaring in the morning.

After catching your breath, your hand subconsciously drifted up to graze against your lower jaw. You could still feel the shallow indent of the scar that rested there. It dragged down your cheek and carved a jagged slit into the skin of your face. Sometimes, after an especially bad night, you would wake up to a searing pain emitting from it. But today, you felt nothing against your fingers but the tough scar tissue.

It was just you in your dorm at the moment. Hallie, your roommate, had early yoga classes on the weekdays and she wouldn't be back until a little after nine. That was if she even came back at all. You had a bad habit of driving away your roommates. The combination of screaming in the late hours of the night and refusing to accompany them to parties that took place after dark usually didn't attract many other suitable living partners. But Hallie didn't seem too bothered.

With a tired groan, you patted your hand over the surface of the bedside table until your hand found the alarm clock and pulled it up close to your face. Your eyes were still bleary with sleep, but you could make out the solid red glowing letters. It was only eight-thirty. You had at least another hour and a half to shower and get ready for the day before your first class.

As you rolled out of bed and began to stretch your limbs, you found yourself unable to shake the feeling that you were being watched. It was an inclination you were now far too used to, but it still left you with uncomfortable shivers from time to time.

You were never quite the same after Woodsboro. While you knew that they were long gone, you couldn't help but see Billy and Stu wherever you went. At school, their reflections lingered in the mirrors and in classroom windows. At home, their faces were plastered all over the news along with memorial images of Sidney and Tatum.

For a solid few months after that horrible night, you couldn't look either Randy or Dewey in the eye. You were too worried that doing so would send you right back to the Macher house, sitting on the kitchen counter and talking idly with the two boys who killed not only three of your best friends and one of their boyfriends, but also your high school principal.

When your obnoxious pink ankle-cast finally came off, it was like you had been washed clean of the entire affair. Out of respect for your grief, very few people at school spoke about the incident. The reporters stopped knocking on your front door a little while after the school year ended, but some late-night talk shows still aired stories on your experience. Your personal favorite segment had been one titled: New-Age Romeo and Juliet: Star-Crossed Killers. It was tabloid, yeah, but very clever.

You and Randy both got accepted into a decent school halfway across the country and just like that, you were free. No more Woodsboro, no more reminders of your trauma, and no more Billy and Stu.

You were almost entirely convinced that the only reason Randy came to Windsor was to keep tabs on you. No one else understood what happened, except maybe Dewey, but even his perception of the event was clouded by Tatum's death. Randy was all you had left and something inside of you hoped that you meant just as much to him in return.