Asher Banning still mourns his mother after three years. When his friend, Caden, decides to get their group of friends together for Christmas as a way to help Asher not feel lonely for the holidays, things quickly turn upside down.
MATURE: for expl...
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Exhaustion overwhelmed my body, but I couldn't fall asleep. I lay in bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling. My mind wandered.
One moment, she was here.
The next, she was gone.
One moment, she was here.
The next, she was gone.
One moment, she was here.
The next, she was gone.
It was like my conscious was trying to tell me something, but it wasn't clicking in my brain. Maybe I was in denial, and these words were the strings that attached to reality. It was like I stepped into the Twilight Zone where anything and everything was possible. Where my friends, whom I'd known for years, were doing things that were out of character.
The Kirsty I knew wouldn't have had anything to do with drugs, let alone meth. The Kirsty I knew wouldn't have kept her depression a secret. She told someone—one of us or all of us—her emotions and thoughts toward almost anything. Sometimes, she over-shared. She was comfortable with us knowing how she felt, and she would've told us how she felt if she was depressed. The Kirsty I knew wasn't like this person we theorized, the person who we found, the person who we may think she was. The Kirsty I knew was gone. And she was never coming back.
I wondered about the shed, like how she got in, why we didn't notice anything strange or why no one saw her leaving.
My head throbbed. "Ugh." I turned over, letting my elbow support my upper body so I could sit halfway up. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and turned it on, looking at the time: 3:18 A.M. I placed the phone back on the nightstand, then pushed the covers off me, getting out of bed.
I walked through the dark hallway and into the bathroom just a few doors away from the bedroom. My fingers flicked on the switch on the wall, near the door. Light illuminated itself around the long and wide mirror.
There was a long cabinet next to the sink and bathtub. We brought a few bottles of medicine and band-aids, but otherwise, the majority of the shelf had nothing on it. I took the bottle of Aspirin and gave myself two, swallowing both at the same time without water. The foul taste lingered, but I didn't mind.
After the bottle was back on the shelf, I switched off the light and walked down the hall toward the stairs. At the bottom of the steps, I made a left to the library.
Turning the knob felt like I was ready to confront the past. And with one flip of the switch, the feeling became a quick gut-wrenching reality that nearly brought me to my knees like a ghost popped out from the other side, going right through me.
Dust covered the furniture, but everything stayed the same. Nothing was out of place; not the candles on the desk, not the books on the shelves, not even the photos of my mother that hung on the wall. It was like coming back before her death. Before life changed. Before things fell out of place and crumbled around me.
