everything i've learned and the things i've seen, it shatters inside of me. i don't know why it's taken me this long, why i refused to see him for who he really is. why i don't shrink from him, as i declare aloud without any hesitation or ambiguity...
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{twenty-six}
trapped
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i knew i was being watched from the second that i sat down beside natalie and her friends. it had been day two of this and i still couldn't really fathom it yet.
it had been a little too pleasant -- enough so that i felt uneasy with how comfortably i had fit in amongst strangers. for the first time, i experienced what it was like to not eat alone at lunch, usually spending the half-hour trying to find acceptance with my pathetic loneliness. it seemed far less complicated when i could just blend in amongst a crowd of loud teenagers. even if i'm on edge, wondering when they'll realize that they're sitting next to someone who knows something they don't.
that while they're chattering ceaselessly about patrick's disappearance, i'm wondering if there's someone else to blame. i'm thinking about a boy sitting in a jail cell for a crime he possibly didn't commit and the clever killer admiring their handy-work from afar. the sequence of days leading up to mandy's death and if her murder was completely pre-meditated or just simply unexpected. regardless of whatever happened to her, it was the product of someone in a deep state of rage. someone who wanted to make her hurt, someone who wanted to send a message.
i think of the days after the incident when i sat across from the lead detective, jane melrose. what she said to me rings through my ears without relent, like a pounding, reopened wound. 'there's someone out there, thinking they got away with it.' her piercing gaze as she said it to me, as if she could sense something i couldn't at the time. i wondered why -- now, of all times -- that her statement sticks to my chest with revelation.
the hair on the back of my neck rose softly, tickling my skin with a shiver. i didn't have to guess who was staring at me from across the cafeteria, my body already relived the influx of panic. everyone was hysterical with the new information that spread through our town like a disease so infectiously disastrous. the school administration left everyone on bated breath, waiting for someone to announce to us what the fuck to think. yet they never did, the principal never acknowledged the arrest that happened on monday, or the sudden departure of the police's presence throughout the campus. no one explained why all the posters of amanda seymour's face vanished overnight and why no one wants to admit out loud that this isn't just some bad dream.
that this is in fact happening and that we have spent the entire month walking amongst someone who's capable of murder.
suddenly, the school looked like nothing had even happened. everything went back to normal, without any source of understanding or instruction on how to feel. patrick was thrown away in a prison cell awaiting trial and imminent misery. everyone else was left in the background to move on and get over it. except, what the school seemed to have forgotten was that ignoring it didn't quieten down the whispers. it only made everyone louder.
