I throw my backpack on the floor and walk over to Sammy who is sitting on the bed with her laptop on her slender legs.
Maybe she went home and got some things, seeing her yesterday at the hospital was rather abrupt.
"How was your day?" she asks.
"Ordinary, except for the new kid…" I say sitting near her.
"Hmm, I've heard of him, everyone is talking about him. He's your biology partner, isn't he?"
"I didn't see you at school, how do you know?"
"Everyone knows." She rolls her eyes.
Sammy is the only person I can talk openly about my feelings...
Even though she's only a year older than me, she advises me as if she's already lived a lot and learned many life lessons.
Not that it's always good advice, since she usually doesn't think about what she's going to say and always says what she thinks.
"Can I ask you a question?" I ask, looking at her intently.
She pauses and closes the laptop.
"Of course." There's an edge in her voice that I ignore, for now.
Sammy is so beautiful and outgoing that I even suspect we are sisters, daughters of the same parents.
She could easily have been adopted.
I think everyone at school thinks the same.
Mainly her football player boyfriend, who thinks I'm weird, since I'm the complete opposite of Sammy. Not that I like him either.
"What do you want to ask?"
"What happened after I left home on the day of the accident?" |I ask quietly
Her countenance darkens and she looks at me for a long while before relaxing and sighs.
"I-I don't remember anything properly, just flashes…" She starts.
My heart skips a beat for some reason.
"And what are these flashes like?" I interrupt.
"After dad's car left, someone knocked on the door… when I opened it, there was no one there, then when I locked the door and turned around, there was a man in front of me." She stops and shudders, then looks away and continues in a small voice. "He threw me to the ground, and stuck a needle in my heart… I… I remember feeling a lot of pain as if someone was sticking knives all over my body, after that I just remember waking up in the hospital, and the doctor saying that my parents had died in a car accident."
Her eyes start to water and her voice is shaky.
I close my firsts so tightly I can feel my nails digging into my palms, the pain keeping me from shaking.
"But this guy, what was he like?"
She still doesn't look at me.
"It's going to sound crazy, but he had white hair and golden eyes... That's all I remember."
A sudden jolt in my head makes me get up from the bed like it's on fire. I can't stop pacing around, my heart beating out of control.
It takes me a while to calm down and sit near her again, my thoughts a mile per second, trying to understand why this is happening to us.
"Sammy, I need to tell you... Almost the same thing happened to me. I saw this guy in the middle of the road. It was because of him that our father swerved, crashed the car, and flipped over. I passed out. When I woke up, I was lying on the asphalt. He was beside me and stuck the needle in my heart. But first, he said his name: Theodore Emmerich. Then he disappeared, and the last thing I saw was our parents' car on fire."
I say it all in one breath and she looks at me in pure horror. The tears starting to fall like pearls on a broken string.
I hate crying, but now, I can't hold it back and we end up hugging each other in a flood of tears.
We cry for everything bad that has happened so far.
When we finally had no more tears left, we promised each other that we would get revenge on Theodore Emmerich.
We can't let this go without doing anything, our parents can't just be gone for nothing.
And we need to get to the bottom of this all. I can see the same hatred in her eyes that I'm sure it's reflected in mine.
He took everything from us, and we will give him back tenfold.
***
I just want to get to Amy's house soon, my prehistoric best friend.
It's been so long since we've seen each other. At least ten years now.
Sammy hates her, so he wanted to stay home.
My parents seem happy.
They love the Smiths, Ammy's parents.
Lucia, my mother, has blonde hair and almond-shaped eyes, her skin is a little marked by age, but she is not that old and remains as graceful as she has been since I can remember. She is talking about some raccoon that appeared in our backyard.
Phillip, my father, is also blond with some gray hairs, with bluish-gray eyes, he doesn't have a prominent belly like most fathers I know, he's actually quite strong, very funny and loving.
I don't look like either of them at all.
For some reason I'm feeling a little out of it, like something bad is going to happen.
I try to forget my anxiety by turning on the ipod at maximum volume.
Out of nowhere he appears.
And everything changes.
The landscape, once so calm and green, is replaced by dry and putrid trees, a thick fog obscures the view and a smell of death fills the air and burns my lungs.
The sky, which was once so clear and blue, turns black like a chasm, and the clouds bleed.
He disappears into the mist.
The car sewers as my father dodges something invisible.
Then I'm weightless as the car falls into the abyss.
The smell of blood and gasoline fills the air, it's all I can smell.
I know that death is approaching every second.
A figure can be seen in the darkness.
The golden eyes are the last things I see.
As the car explodes and I am slowly engulfed in flames.
***
Lou rushes into the room and pulls me out of my nightmare.
I'm gasping like I was being suffocated.
"Where have you been? I've been looking for you everywhere!" Lou says furiously.
I take a moment to come back to reality and understand what she is saying.
"Sorry, I missed gym class because I needed to come talk to Sammy and you were in class."
I try to reason why she is so pissed.
"But that's not why I'm looking for you." Lou says as she throws herself on the bed next to me.
"So why?" Sammy retorts as she gets up sleepily.
Just now I noticed I fell asleep in Sammy's bed.
Lou is suddenly looking at me expectantly and I feel my stomach drop.
"Because Marcy Heidfeld kissed Lucca Kingsford in the cafeteria."
What?
I've never been possessive over a boy, but at that moment I wanted to grab Marcy by the hair and beat the shit out of her. Which takes me by surprise and makes me pause.
Marcy Heidfeld, strawberry blonde with blue eyes and the leader of our school cheerleaders, daughter of Sean and Julie Heidfeld, the richest couple in South Lake.
Marcy is the bitchiest preppy girl at St. Virginia High School. And she happens to have a mortal hatred for me (I have no idea why), which of course I return in kind because I'm quiet, not stupid. She makes very clear she hates me and I'm not the kind to just take it and let it slide. I have some backbone.
She only studies at our school because her parents wanted her to learn values and leave behind arrogance and superiority, those things rich folks talk about as if means something.
Which obviously didn't happen.
"That's right, she kissed him. She started flirting, then since he didn't care, she decided to attack him."
Lou's voice turns from furious to a little gloating, which throws me off a little.
"Did... he... liked it?"
The question escapes my lips before I can think better.
I can feel Sammy glaring at me and my face gets hot.
Why do I care?
"Not at all, he told her not to come near him, and that she was crazy. He's one of us." Lou says with secret satisfaction.
"She must have been furious." Sammy comments lightly.
I feel an inexplicable relief inside.
Even though he has nothing to do with me.
And it probably will never have.
I think I have to stop being so pessimistic, I chastise myself.
It doesn't work.