Prologue.
Her name was Lorelle. Lorelle Stevenson.
She never seemed right in the head to the others: she was always away with the Faeries. To everyone, she was the strange girl who sat in the corner drawing folklore based pictures. Each one of the pictures had a different meaning that only she could interpret and understand.
But I understood. She saw things that others didn't.
Holly Hope is my name. I think it's a strange name, but it's my name after all. I was born nineteen-sixty-four... and died nineteen-seventy-eight. I was fourteen when my cruel fate arrived.
A lot of people believe that death is evil and scary, they try not to think about it, but death is one of the most beautiful things ever. Only those people who have died know the true beauty of death and the afterlife. There's no need to be scared of death. Some people say you go to Heaven if you're good in your life and Hell if you're bad. I went to neither.
My murderer lived on a farm. He was an old man, a senior citizen who was respected by all. My parents knew him very well too. He watched me everyday as I crossed the farm on the way home from my dance class. Every Sunday he would walk down and sit in the bushes next to my house drawing pictures of animals, animals that I'm sure didn't exist on Earth. Maybe he was crazy.
I befriended Lorelle a week before I died. She was a very interesting person. She told me her secrets, I told her mine. One of the many things she told me was that she wasn't meant to be alive. She died as a baby. Her parents made a deal with a woman dressed in black who appeared in the bathroom. She belonged to the devil. Voices would echo in her head which caused her to black out often and have major panic attacks. Life for her was on the edge when she was five; her mother tried to kill her with scissors. Of course her mother went to court and to this day, she is in a mental hospital. The woman sees her frequently, watching her try to kill her, but before she could, she blacks out.
Lorelle told me that her mother said she shall die at the age of sixteen.
I didn't ask why.
