Imagine (A Short Story)

Lists

CNN, CBS, Fox news, 60 minutes. Everyone wants to talk to you. Ellen called. So did Oprah. You didn't even know that Oprah does that sort of thing. They all want to hear from the "hero". You still don't feel like the hero you have been made out to be. It feels false. You helped someone because they needed it. That doesn't make a hero. A hero is someone who is brave and risks their own lives for others. Kinda like you did.
But you don't want to be a hero. You don't want to be brave. You just want to forget about what happened and move on. You want to be able to sleep without hearing gunshots. You want to be able to look at your hands and not see the blood dripping off them. You want to be able to see red and not see the blood. You can't even look at your phone! There's blood on the case. It wasn't damaged, but the blood is still there. Still reminding you. Yet you can't bring yourself to remove the cadde because that would mean touching the case and the blood which means memorys which leads to fear and anger and trauma.. No. Better play it safe. Do everything you can to forget and move on.
  Sighing, you get up and throw your phone away. You'll ask mom to buy you a new one. Or not. There's nothing important on it. Just social media and a few pictures of random things. Nothing important. Nothing special. You only use your phone for messaging people. You don't really post on Instagram. Waste of time. But..
  You dig your phone out of the trash and turn it back on. You go on Instagram and sure enough, you have a ton of notifications. People tagging you, following you, messaging you. Wishing you well, thanking you for helping someone, making sure you're alive, asking for interviews. There's so much.. Its overwhelming. Ignoring everything, you go on the school webpage and there is a page of school victims. 17 victims.. It takes you a moment to get past the sheer number of lives that had been wasted. Your emotions are out of control. You throw your phone down on the bed and lay back next to it, staring up at the ceiling.
  I can't do this.
There's a tap on the door. It's your sister.
  "Jake?" She asks, hesitantly opening the door.
"Can I come in?" Her voice is a little shaky. She had stayed home from school yesterday. She'd been "sick" and had probably been on her phone the whole time.
  You give a nod so small you are surprised that she saw it. She came in and sat next to you on the bed, picking up the phone. She quickly read through the list of names. You can feel her tense up and start shaking. You never got through the list so you can only imagine who she'd lost. When she starts crying, you sit up and take the phone from her. You glance through and your heart sinks. The list of names are like a slow burn. More painful by the second.
Alyssa Alhadeff
Jaime Guttenberg
Scott Beigel
Meadow Pollack
Peter Wang
Chris Hixon
Luke Hoyer
Cara Loughran 
Gina Montalto 
Joaquin "Guac" Oliver 
Alaina Petty 
Helena Ramsey
Alex Schachter 
Carmen Schentrup 
Aaron Feis
Martin Duque
Nicholas Dworet
  You don't personally know any of them except the gym teachers. But you've seen their faces, heard their names. You look at their ages and realize your sister was in the same grade as most of them. Freshman. She probably would have been in class with them if she had gone to school. She could have been on the list.
It could have been her. 
All you can do is let the tears stream down your face once more and hold your sister in your arms. Eventually your brother comes in and finds you guys, crying and hugging. He doesn't say anything, just quietly joins the hug.
  Then your parents find you. They are already crying. Probably having seen the same list. They don't have words to say to try to ease the pain of the loss you have suffered. That everyone has suffered. They just come and sit on either side of the bed and wrap their arms around you.
  A silent bond of blood and tears. Everyone grateful for the other. Knowing it could have easily been any of them. No words are said, but you don't need them. Actions are worth a million words. After an eternity of just holding on and staying together, everyone seems to pull away at the same time. You know as they do, that this is probably the first time that your family has been a united front.
Death brings people together.
  You decided to do a single interview. Fox News. They decided to set up the interview for Friday. Tomorrow. Your mother was.. Excited. Sort of. She was upset about the reason you're temporarily famous for, but excited that you'd get a chance to share your story. She doesn't think about the weight on your shoulders. She doesn't think about the mountains of memory's making you hunch over in pain.
  But you do. Every second. Its the first thing in your mind, behind every corner of happiness and good memory, lay the bad ones. The ones that will haunt you for the rest of your life. The ones that tint the very color of the world you live in. Everything is red. And red it will say. These torturous memory's make it hard to see the good left in the world. Even the little things. These memory's make even the prettiest flower deadly.

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K sorry these are super short now, I'm trying to make the pages smaller so the story will not be as long seeming. Also so I can publish a new page more often. The long ones take forever to write.