"Pretty girls like you get lost in these woods all the time, Alexa."
On the night of Sebastián's annual Beginning of Summer Bash, amiable and adventurous Melody Tryniski went missing. What might have appeared as a juvenile escapade - a casual incide...
Ups! Tento obrázek porušuje naše pokyny k obsahu. Před publikováním ho, prosím, buď odstraň, nebo nahraď jiným.
THE NIGHT'S FRESH AIR brushes my skin, crisp and cold against my shivering body. It breezes through my curls, tickling my scalp and dancing its way to my bones. Nights in Levittown are similar to what resides inside its citizens: cold, unrelenting, dark. The weather is bad, piercing through every bone and every tissue in my body, but it helps me with my breathing. Air circulates inside of me until it arrives to my lungs in icy sharps, breaking the obstruction of the painful lump in my throat.
In the distance, the vacant streets are swallowed in obscurity, missing the light from each standing lamp post. It's difficult to decipher where the street leads to and where the houses begin to align. It's not a problem, though; people in this town have been led by darkness all their lives, so we know our paths by heart and soul.
There are cars aligned in front of the diner, each one occupying a space in a neat manner. Lights from inside the diner are reflecting on the cars' windows, twinkling against their cheap paint. They bathe the whole parking lot, pink and orange and blue and yellow, and the asphalt beneath my feet. But, they don't reach the streets' obscurity. They only fade the further something is. I can see it now: the bright colors inside, their blurry reflection on the parking lot, their incapability to touch the darkness.
Life is inside, while the outside is for the dead. The lights don't touch me, they don't pool on my dark skin with vibrant enthusiasm. I'm behind a wall, hidden inside the shadows. And, in a way, I'm between it all, teetering between life and death. Melody, though, is rotting under piles and piles of dirt.
What happens when she's forgotten? Another murder unsolved, a cold case. The interest of murder enthusiasts thirty years from now, more details appearing over the years about the cause of death and things that are overlooked by detectives right now. Her light will dim and another will take her spot.
She will fall from her stardom.
For now, she's the center of everything and we're orbiting around her. In this moment, this fleeting passing of the present, we're vulnerable subjects to an audience all around the world. Maybe someday there will be a documentary about the case blaming one of us for her murder, as if it's that easy to resolve. Of course, it won't matter, not in that distant future. All that matters is now.
It's ironic - how I was unable to read Melody's letter in its entirety when I first discovered it, and how I couldn't bring myself to read the newspaper article. Both have crucial information to Melody's death, and I just ignored them. Maybe it's fear, it may be ignorance, but my stubbornness always rules above everything else.
The letter I understand - it's a last connection to Melody, her last words written on paper. The newspaper article, well, it dives deeper into W.S.'s crimes and I've tried all my life to avoid those chunks of gruesome information. It's just something I don't need in my mind, in my conscience, in my deepest, darkest nightmares. Honestly, it's a waste of my time.
