The Lunacy of Tyler Lockhart ✔️

Chapter Two - Past

Past

Victoria

Eccentric. Crazy. Narcissist. Stinking Rich.

Those were the words used to describe Tyler in high school. We were both seventeen at the time and we'd been friends since we were in middle school. To say I liked Tyler would be an understatement of the century. All my friends at school knew how much I crushed on him despite all the nasty things they said behind his back. There were a lot of girls who fought for Tyler's attention but having my twin brother Archer as his best friend gave me the advantage over the others.

Archer and Tyler were inseparable; they played PS together, studied in the same class and played the same sport which made them best friends, and that's how I'd gotten closer to Tyler. How often is it that you became best friends with your brothers best friend?

Not very often right?

Okay, maybe....my gender did play a bit of a role in our friendship and the fact that Tyler knew in the back of his mind that I had a major crush on him.

The reason?

His younger sister Maya.

Maya liked to tease me when Tyler was around, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that Maya may have told Tyler that I really did like him. A lot. Although I'd never admitted my feelings to him directly, nor had he suggested that he reciprocated any of those said feelings, I feared that if I found some courage and asked him out, and if Ty flat out said no, my heart would break into a gazillion pieces that no glue in the world would be able to fix, and I couldn't risk that.

So life went on. Tyler, Archer and I hung out. I was like a third wheel between two friends, and they didn't mind or didn't care. But guess what, life has a lot of phases. And as soon as Tyler and Archer were shuffled in two different classes, their friendship wasn't all that it used to be. They remained friends and occasionally hung out but not as much as before. I had remained his best friend throughout. Tyler and I went for movies together and hung out often. At that time, we lived in the same neighborhood as the Lockharts'.

Tyler lived in a huge Italianate mansion surrounded by a forest and a lake house amid acres and acres of land. I lived just down the street when I looked out of my window; I could see the smoke erupting from the mansion's chimney.

I loved watching that house even though a lot of people in town wouldn't go anywhere near it. There were rumors in town about the Lockhart's. The family was linked to a lot of murders, the mafia, and years of bad omen. If you came in contact with the family, bad things happened to you. Rumors said that Tyler's great grandmother had committed suicide in their barn by hanging herself from a noose. Tyler's father, Jasper was a young boy when the incident happened. The family had spent several days looking for the old woman until seven-year-old Jasper strayed into the barn one evening and found his grandmother.

Hanging. Her eyes bulging out, the body was rotting.

There was a curse on the family. Truthfully, I didn't believe any of it. The Lockhart's' were a rich, influential family with a string of bad rumors surrounding them. I didn't understand what people gained from engaging in useless gossip. When I asked Tyler about it, he made fun of me and said that it was indeed true but his mischievous smile told me otherwise, when I asked his younger sister Maya, she shrugged it off too which made everything even more mysterious. And there were even more rumors, about Tyler's father...

The buzzing of my phone disrupted my thoughts. Tyler's name flashed across the screen and my heart did a double somersault. The butterflies usually went bonkers.