Gone Home✔️

Chapter 06: Flood Warning

As I stepped out of dad's office, still feeling in a bit of shock, I looked around, trying to plan my next move. The hallway ended not far off to my right, making a turn out of sight to the right, and to the left was an open door. I began to head towards the door, but then I noticed another wastebasket at the corner of the turn in the hall...and another crumpled up piece of paper. I knelt, grabbed it, smoothed it out and read it.

It was tough, because it had been torn in two.

It was Sam's handwriting, and someone else's I didn't recognize, but I did immediately recognize the style: it was a note, passed back and forth in class. A silent conversation during the intolerably boring hours of chemistry or math.

I was glad to be out of high school.

Hey are you that new girl Sam? I'm Tommy, I'm
at the back behind you wave if you get this wave
and write back.

Hi Tommy. Yes, I'm Samantha and yes
I'm new. What's up?

I just thought since youre new maybe you
could use a friend. I don't have a lot of friends
either and so I thought Id ask something
if you dont mind do you mind?

Y/N

She'd circled N.

No I don't mind. What did you want to ask?

Was it just your uncle who went psycho
or does it run in the family

Fucking asshole! I felt so bad for Sam. I remembered how hard it could be in school. I knew I'd had it relatively easy. No one really seemed to want to mess with me, but Sam was kind of a magnet for that kind of stuff. People were always messing with her. Apparently her bad luck had followed her to this new school...ugh! This was so sucky, and I hadn't been there for her at all. I tore the paper up some more and threw it all into the wastebasket, disgusted. This Tommy asshole better hope I never meet him.

As I approached the open door, I began to hear something...it was talking.

Someone was talking. A man. I felt my body begin to go cold and my heart start to hammer faster. Was someone in here? But as I listened, I realized it sounded like it was coming from a speaker...I peeked into the room and relief flooded through me. Just a TV. A pre-recorded sound bite was warning of extreme weather and flooding in the area and I guess we'd lost the cable. I looked around the room. Apparently I'd found the living room, or maybe it was the TV room.

There was a fireplace to the right and bookshelves to the left, hugging the walls. A big L-shaped couch took up the center of the room, facing the TV. The TV and a single floor lamp were all that were providing light. I don't know why, but I'm the kind of person that needs a lot of light in the room. I always have a minimum of two lamps wherever I live, in addition to the overhead light, three lamps if I can help it.

Mom and dad were always griping about the electric bill and now I felt kind of guilty about that, all the arguments we'd had. But man, I needed light! Shadows bugged me for some reason. It wasn't even a fear thing, (well, normally, this place was kind of creepy though), it was just a...I don't know what it was, all I know is that I need lots of light.

So, naturally, I flipped on the lights the room came with, as well as a lamp on an endtable right in front of me, next to the couch. From my view, I could see that Sam had built a little fort against the couch out of cushions and a blanket. On the endtable I was standing at, I found a page torn from a TV Guide.

The X-Files had been circled.

Of course. Sam loved the X-Files. I walked in front of the couch, in between it and a coffee table that had been shoved aside to make way for the fort. There was a box of pizza from a place called Amore Pizza. Empty, of course. And very greasy, too. I came around to the front of the little fort Sam had made. As I crouched and looked inside, finding a can of Dr. Jitters soda and a book called Hauntings & Poltergeists, I was suddenly hit by a wave of incredibly powerful grief and lonely nostalgia.