NUMB [ON HOLD]

"What do you mean my mom got shot?!" My heart charges. Like someone just zapped a million volts through my body, I stood up abruptly. My free hand grips my backpack. A vocal tic rolls up my chest until it flops from my mouth in the form of a moan, a strangled one.
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"Hospital?"
That's bad, Hospitals are for sick people. This is bad.
My brain shuts down; my muscles stop working. My legs crumble beneath me, and my knees slam into the floor, hard. The room wobbles around me as the world moves out of focus... and then black. Darkness!

* * * *

She was halfway between a child and a woman. A cruel mass shooting left her broken and without a mother. Takes a father's soul along with her, and leaves a ghost to raise a girl and teach her how to be empty until the feeling of grief gives way to NUMBNESS.

She lives in a constructed imaginary universe where she is the boss of everything, where she chooses who leaves and who stays so she won't have to lose anyone ever again. She is up for vengeance, each and every person who took her mom's life.

There is a twist, Will love heal her past and erase the memories of vengeance and murders? Or is there something more real? something more exquisite?..... something she can't just walk away from, like falling in love with the anonymous gang leader who killed her mom.