"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...
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I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S more frightening: to have Melody's last letter or to hold a death threat from her killer.
One will show me the truth, the other what can happen if that truth is revealed. My body hasn't stopped trembling since I found U's note in my bag. My head can't wrap around the idea that her killer has been through my personal belongings. This only proves that someone close to me, someone who knows who I am and the places I frequent, is the killer. The question is, who? Who could've put it in my bag? How did this person have access to my bag? The thought alone sends shivers down my spine, something dark and fierce and nauseating settling in my stomach.
This person knows who I am and has been coexisting with me all along. He probably laughs every time we part ways, knowing well that I'm searching for someone who's been there all along --- someone who's not even hiding. That's the scariest part. He sees me, knows what I'm doing in secret, and I can't see him. I can't see Melody's killer because he hides behind an angelic face, a charming smile thrown every chance he gets, a soft voice to hide the darkness that's within.
Now I understand what Melody meant when she wrote that I'm in danger if I share this information with anyone. She said I shouldn't trust anyone, not even her. She was trying to protect me from revealing the information to the wrong person. Melody knew the killer would be close to her friends, inspiring trust and mimicking a mutual grief. He's out there and, somehow, had the time to place that note in my bag without being seen.
I'm always watching. I'm everywhere. I'm omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient.
Of course, it was right there on his first note. He's not this all-powerful being; he's just a creep who has perfected the act of pretending. It's a game and, for whatever reason, I'm caught in the middle. Not Melody, not Christopher, not the town, but me. It all comes back to me. I can't shake this familiar feeling, this dread that's been growing inside me since 2008. W.S. might be rotting in a jail cell, but that doesn't mean that his dark spirit doesn't linger around this town. He's left an imprint of himself in Levittown, and there's no way to erase it.
It's everywhere. Living inside the citizens, pumping in the woods, flying in the air, bleeding on my mother's memory. It's poisoning us all by excluding us from the world. Levittown is forced to become its own little world, a world with its own little rules that don't abide by morality or ethics. Soon enough, we won't be able to differentiate between good and evil. It would all be the same to us.
The thought only leaves a hollow place inside me, a void where feelings and emotions and the conscious thoughts don't have any real value. It's already starting in me. It starts with me. The girl who sees dead people. The girl without a mom. The girl with a mom that had an affair with a serial killer. The girl with the dead best friend. The girl who couldn't protect her best friend. The only black girl in town. The girl who has always been close to death, but not close enough to leave with it. The girl who, despite it all, hasn't left this shitty town.
