✓1.0 | Letters From Serena

12 | M

BY NOW, IT was clear to a select few that Seth Naifeh had been harbouring a surreptitious secret; he was the one who had been delivering the letters.

It was too much of a coincidence for him to have been located so close to the recipients when they had received the letters. Meiji with his signature bench, Diana with her rooftop rendezvous, Meridian — everyone.

Conjunctly, it meant he too, had been the recipient of a letter. How else could he have known where to deposit the letters?

Most people couldn't have imagined how Serena Wilson had found the courage, the will in herself to write a letter to Seth Naifeh. After all, everyone knew that he was the person who initiated the cause of her pain, the person who caused her highschool experience to resemble hell on earth, with his spurious rumours and taunts in the hallway.

Why would she want to give him any satisfaction, any form of goodbyes, when it was almost certain that it was his actions that led to her inevitable downfall.

That however, was where they were wrong. Seth Naifeh wasn't the key cause of her death. If the very same people who were so quick to make assumptions and proliferate rumours could have spent just a fraction of their time to analyse Seth properly, they would've seen him the way she had.

They would've understood why he had done what he did. Why he had turned into such a cruel-hearted person.

She knew that the person he had turned into was partially her fault.

Owing to that fact, she couldn't ever find it in herself to hate him. How could she hate him when his hate towards her was justified?

If they hadn't attended that party by her persuasion, his father may have still been alive. Deep down, the girl knew that the accident didn't mitigate the severity of his actions towards her, yet at the time, she was hurting too. She blamed herself far more and to her, it only seemed fair that Seth was allowed to lash out at her.

It was her fault.

But of course, that wasn't the only reason she'd written him a letter.

No one seemed to realise that in the months leading up to her decision, Seth had stopped bullying her. He'd called off his entire crew, too. The first time he walked past her in the hallways without glaring at her, her mouth had fallen agape and she had taken a double-take. No one bothered her for the rest of that day either. She had been surprised and treaded lightly, wondering if it was an act of maginimosity reserved just for that particular day.

But when their indifference towards her presence continued on to the next day, and the next and the next — it was clear that Seth had stopped. It wasn't as if he had started to interact with her but he'd stopped harassing her.

But even with Seth's commands, Jake was unrelenting.

Jake's torments were on a different scale. It wasn't a simple action that could be easily ignored like name-calling, it was bigger. Jake never knew when to stop.

Serena had heard of an analogy that seemed too fitting for this situation : leaving a frog in tepid water and slowly increasing the temperature until the frog ultimately died.

It was the analogy for an abusive relationship. When he started small, the actions didn't bother her but the violence escalated until the girl was left scared and fearing for her own safety.

By the time she realised what was happening, it was too late.

It was why she'd written Seth a letter. The past between was abysmal. The accident stretching the once partners-in-crime into forlorn strangers, placing an immeasurable wedge between them.