Hide and Secret (Wattys2015)

(19) Serena's POV

The doorbell was ringing frantically, as if someone was in a hurry about something..

I was sitting on the couch when it rang, flipping through random channels on the television. I was almost dying of boredom and was happy for a distraction of any kind. My mother, after a lot of incessent fondling and hugging, decided to let me stay home the next day. Decided was probably the wrong word to use, because I had no choice in the matter.

I was practically under lockdown.

It sucked.

And I hadn't even told Mom about the recurring nightmares I'd been having. I was trapped in a dark, shadowy room, with Chuck growing larger right before my eyes. Every step he took closer was breaking another part of me. Finally, he got close enough to grab me. Holding me with one arm, he would use his other hand to unbutton my pants, pull them down...

Then I would usually wake up.

Usually.

Banning the thoughts of my nightmares from my head, I opened the door, and there stood Taylor. Sweating, panting, and red-faced, she looked as though she'd just ran a 5K. My eyes widened as she stood there, breathing heavily. "Taylor? Are you all right? What's the matter?"

Taylor finally managed to control her breathing. "Serena... Zach's not the sender!"

My jaw dropped. No, this was not possible. Taylor was obviously getting pranked or something. "What? Who told you that?"

Taylor stepped inside my house, closing the door behind her. And then, she told me everything. How Zach was framed. How Emory got messages too. How the sender was still out there for sure. Watching us. Stalking us.

Trying to hurt us. "Well, we need to do something," I said in a nervous tone when Taylor finished.

Taylor nodded. "But what? How are we supposed to find anything about this person?"

Suddenly, we heard thunder from outside the house. It was quickly followed by lightning. I jumped at the sound, my heart pounding with fear. I now jumped at any slight noise. I was that paranoid because of everything that had happened to me.

God, I needed a therapist. Or a psychologist. Or something.

"We need to go back to Zach's place," Taylor confirmed, after thinking for a minute. "If there's anything there to incriminate the sender, it should be where Jill was kidnapped. Maybe the sender got sloppy and left their actual stuff around."

"You want us to go to Zach's cabin... In the rain?" I asked pointedly, giving a furtive glance towards the window, where signs of a torrential downpour where quickly showing.

Taylor shrugged, tucking her hair behind her ears. "Why not? It's not like we're going to be driving there with the car top down."

I didn't want to go out in the rain. What if something happened? What if the roads were slippery and our car skidded off the road and I broke every bone in my body and died? After almost getting shot in the head, the realizations had all fully sunk in. I could get seriously hurt doing everything that I'd been doing. But instead of telling Taylor that, I did what I had become so accustomed to doing: Leaping right in headfirst into a possible tank of sharks. "Fine. Just let me grab my coat."

I went into the kitchen, where the coats were hung up on the coat rack. I grabbed my navy blue hooded peacoat and put it on, buttoning it up and tying it tightly. Mom looked up from where she was at the counter, cutting carrots for our dinner tonight. She silently took in my jacket. "Going out? In this weather?"

"I'm having a major Starbucks craving," I lied. I didn't want to tell Mom where I was really headed for two reasons. The first reason was that if she knew, there was no way she'd let me go. The second reason was that I didn't want her to know that we had the wrong creep in jail. Mom worried enough about me, and though I liked the attention, I didn't like stressing her out.