The scene outside of my house was one of heavy rain, loud thunder, and lightning that threatened to strike someone dead if they set a foot outside of their front door. I usually liked storms, but not when so much rain was involved. You couldn't appreciate the lightning when all the rain hindered your vision.

It was a Sunday night, the last night before my junior year of high school and I was in my bedroom, wide-awake and bored. It would've been dumb to use something electrical, and I didn't feel like reading a book, so I lay in my bed, covers pulled to my chin, wondering when the rain would finally stop. I didn't like situations like this, they gave me too much time to think; and not about useful things, no. More about things that went along with self-doubt, pain and anger. It was ridiculous lately how much I'd been turning into an emotional martyr. I groaned as my mind started to spit out random thoughts.

I couldn't help but consider the fact that I'd been single for quite a while now, my own doing. I didn't find it fair to date someone I didn't really like, and half the guys who'd ever liked me were complete jerks, so that had never helped. Maybe I was too picky, that could explain things. Or maybe I was just too weird. That could definitely explain it. I was the kind of person who laughed during horror movies, didn't like any kind of brown soda and refused to read a series if I hadn't read the first book.

But what was by far the most certain possibility was this:
I'd always had a horrible relationship with my family, which had only ended when the last member had died a few months ago, when I was fifteen.

Actually, it had been my birthday when I had gotten the news. I was 2 weeks into a vacation I had decided to take to Italy (even though my family was messed up, we had a rather large inheritance) and had cut the vacation short so I could fly back. The police said the double homicide of my father and brother was caused by a serial killer. But I had seen the evidence, and I was pretty sure that it was something else. I hadn't had much luck with figuring out what that something was, however, as I wasn't allowed to view the bodies since the occasion.

My mother had always been too egotistical, a trait she'd passed on to my younger brother. She had died when I was 5 from a particularly bad case of pneumonia. Maybe it was for the best, I had never decided that. But that's when I found out how abusive my father could be; he never did get remarried. I knew from the beginning there was something wrong, and sure enough, any family life there had been was destroyed. I rarely saw him; he was a winer and started doing drugs, too busy to really realize what a jerk his son had turned into, and how he were neglecting his daughter. He'd hit me, more times than I could count, ignored me, and when he did pay attention, it was usually only to give me orders; or hurt me. One could only be glad I hadn't turned into a mirror image of him.

I'd realized at the beginning that crying would get me nowhere- except to a place of greater pain. Crying was pretty much forbidden in the household. So over the years, I had become good at hiding tears, as I should have; I'd had almost my whole life to work on it. My definition of crying was tearless, minimum noise sobbing, in which my whole body shook as I locked the pain away inside of me; it was not a fun experience. Holding the pain in blocked my airways, and when I let any noise escape my throat, it was only so I could breath. Even in my state, I didn't feel like suffocating.

Somehow I had found that strange over the years- no matter what happened to me, I never felt like I wanted to die. Even if I saw an opportunity, it never changed anything. I guess that's where the whole being an emotional martyr made up for hurting myself physically.

I was a loner by nature, but I never had any friends anyway. I was the girl that sat in the vey last row of the classroom, partially because of 'good behavior' and partially because that was where I could be even more alone. I guess at some point I thought about ignoring my heart, giving up any fight. I had more and more issues with emotional self-control as time went on, but I never stopped fighting. Even now, I never stopped.

I rolled to my side, shaking my head as though it would get the thoughts out of my head. I didn't want to think about the last three years. When I got like this, there was usually no stopping the onslaught of tremors and near-suffocation. But I didn't feel like repeating a scene like that now, and I managed to turn my thoughts to more positive things. After the double homicide, I had moved into a house that was down the street from my best friend's, Midnight.