Young Keefe Oneshot

"Bye Keefe! See you tomorrow!"

I raise my hand to wave to my best friend, Fitz. "Bye Fitz!" I smile until him and his sister are out of sight. Then I let my mouth fall into its usual frown and start to walk towards the nearest leapmaster. Once I reach it, I quietly say, "Candleshade."

A few seconds later, I stumble out of the leapmaster in my house and run as fast as my stupid short legs can carry me to the vortinator. But before I reach it, a stern voice speaks behind me. "Where do you think you're going, Keefe?"

I turn around to see my father standing about four feet away from me, with a face that anyone but me would call extremely and horribly stern and annoyed.

But I've seen worse.

Much worse.

I push the traumatizing memories to the back of my mind – or at least as far back as they can go – and open my mouth to answer my father. At first, my voice cracks too much, but on the second try I get the words out. "My room."

He lets out a short laugh, if you can even call it that. "And what," he demands, "are you going to do in your room?"

"Study," I lie.

He scoffs. "Sure you are." I frown harder than usual. "Of course I am!" I burst out. "What else would I do?" He looks down at his hands, pretending to inspect them. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe," he looks up at me. "draw?"

"I won't draw! I promise!" I shout, even as I feel my face heating up. He lets his hand fall to his side. "Your promises mean nothing to me." But even as he says that, he turns around and walks in the other direction.

Once he starts walking away, I waste no time in running to the vortinator and saying the floor number of my room. It shoots me up and I feel the smallest amount of sickness in my stomach, but I'm mostly used to it. I enter my room, lock the door, and throw my stupid textbooks onto my bed. Then I get my sketchbook and pencils out of their secret hiding spot and settle down to draw. Like I was actually going to study.

I didn't mean to, but I began to sketch my mother, my father, and I as a happy family, something that we never have been and never will be. I stare at the page that holds the picture I have drawn for just a few seconds, then I rip it out of my sketchbook and crumple it into a ball. When I've compressed it as much as possible, I toss it as far across my huge room as I can, which is actually quite a lot, considering how short my arms are.

After I throw the crumpled page, I consider drawing more, but I can't bring myself to do it. What if I draw some horrid photograph of my "family" again?

So instead, I hide away my drawing supplies and throw myself onto my bed, burying my whole body under the covers, and I cry myself to sleep.

~

I suddenly wake up and immediately sit up in bed. I'm not buried completely under my covers anymore. I must have moved around a lot in my sleep.

I look out the window to see the sun juuuuuuust starting to peek over the horizon. I lay down to go back to sleep – I've still got at least another forty minutes, right? – but just as I do, I feel like something is wrong. Like there is something missing from my brain or something. I rack my mind, trying to think of what it could be or how to find it again, but after around five minutes, I conclude that it was just a random dream.

I try to fall back asleep, but it seems pretty hopeless, what with freaking out over something missing from my brain and stuff. I turn onto my left, hoping that it will help me relax, but right before I close my eyes again, I see a figure standing across from me. I try to scream, but the figure rushes over to me and puts a hand over my mouth, muffling my cry of alarm.

"Shhh," the mysterious figure says in a hoarse whisper. "It's just me, Keefe."

As my eyes adjust better to the darkness and I hear their voice, I realize that the mysterious figure isn't really mysterious at all. It's my mother.

She removes her hand from my mouth and stands up straight again. A small ray of light from the slowly rising sun hits her, and I can see her face with a black hood around it. In fact, she's wearing an entirely black robe. I never thought that my mother would wear black of all colors.

Then again, I stopped paying much attention to her or my father a while ago.

"What are you doing here?" I ask skeptically. She freezes for a split second, so briefly that I hardly see it, and answers, "I came to wake you up for school. Don't want you to be late." After she says that, she immediately hurries out of my room.

Okay, what? First of all, I'm pretty sure she has never woken me up for school before, and if she did, it was when I was pretty young. And secondly, it's nowhere near time to get ready for school. The sun has barely begun to rise!

I push all the weirdness of the last couple of minutes – feeling like something is missing from my brain and my mom waking me up – to the back of my mind, like, reeeeeeeeally far back, and decide to get ready for school since there is pretty close to a zero percent chance of me falling back asleep. Maybe I'll try out a new hairstyle with the extra time. Oh, who am I kidding, I couldn't make my hair look better if I tried.

I get up to go to my bathroom and I glance out my window again. The sun has risen a little bit more since I last looked, but not much. I'm about to look away when I swear I see a shadow flit by. It was so quick, but I swear that it was there. I rush over to the window and look as far as I can see, but my eyes find nothing.

I try to ignore what just happened as I slowly walk towards the bathroom, blaming it on my crazy imagination and being awake so early, but for the rest of the day, I can't shake the feeling that something is off.

As I lie in bed that night, I feel uneasy, like I'm being watched, but I brush it off as me overacting about this morning. But right as I'm drifting into unconsciousness, I feel something grabbing me.

That is all I remember the next morning.