Kidnapped by The Boy With Fangs

Kidnapped by The Boy With Fangs (100 Days Before)

I called around all our friends at the time to ask if Aleasha was still mad at me, until eventually she got my number from someone and text me saying 'I just don't want to be your friend. I don't even see the point; I'll feel uncomfortable talking to you. We couldn't be friends anymore anyway. I hope you'll understand one day.' I desperately tried not to cry, not because I wasn't sad. I was, I just needed to be okay, my sanity sort of depended on it. Those were Aleasha's last words to me. 

Be careful what you make a joke about, I assure you when I had made the bad joke about Aleasha's mother. Dead mother. I didn't know.  I didn't know it would kill the last fraction of alive that was left in her. I didn't know that she would eventually go home one day. And killed herself. I didn't know that her sister would look at me from across the grave at the funeral, with tears uncontrollably falling from her eyes, I didn't know that despite me having taken the most important person she had left in her world, still from the bottom of an empty barrel she would mouth three words to send me hopelessly off into the darkness. 

'I forgive you.' 

Footsteps dragged slowly up the staircase, before leaning into her own door my mum sheepishly made her way to my own. I pretended to sleep, thought I could see her loving smile through my visual spatial scratch pad, the smile that meant I could talk to her at unreasonable o'clock and she wouldn't mind. I let her go because we both weren't in a good place and I didn't want to worry her. 

"I know you’re not sleeping. We'll talk about it in the morning." She said just before kissing my cheek and leaving. 

I turned over and attempted to go to sleep. Visions of Millie, dead on the floor kept creeping into my mind. I really didn't want to be left alone with my thoughts. 

In our second year of school Aleasha decided it would be a good idea to join the film class. We thought it would be fun to sit at the back making jokes about the really bad actors who showed no facial expressions. They were mostly American ones. Emma Watson is my favourite. She is a British actor but she just embodies her characters so perfectly. Mr. Feltham would always turn off the lights in these classes to create a cinema effect, everyone would make jokes that he secretly jacked off in the corner. The irony is most of the boys in film class had just learnt to do this themselves. The lighting was disorientating as it was usually only two o'clock in the afternoon outside. We would leave class and Aleasha would drag me up the Lower Ground stairs, the sunlight would break into my eyes and I would pretend to be a vampire dying. 

I turned over again. I could feel my heart beating faster. I closed my eyes, her hand at her side she fearlessly walked to the baguette shop kitchen. I sat up and took another sip of water. I rested my head against the wall behind me. 

One day when Mr. Feltham had paused the film to ask questions (check we were actually learning something), one of the smarter kids with pushy middle class parents who sent their children to these classes in an attempt to make them "cultured", had asked about Todorov and narrative, 'there was always a new equilibrium when the chaos subsided' the girl had made it sound really poetic. Mr. Feltham looked at her on the brink of laughter, it was then I understood that he was not a child of the middle class. He might even have sat at the back of classes like I had been doing. "One" could not be sure, as he had a sense of formality for using vocabulary like "symbiotic". Words no one understood or gave two pence about. O'ryan had said it was "like how trees don't need oxygen and we don't need carbon dioxide but we would die without each other’s waste." I never heard Mr. Feltham's explanation.

I was too engrossed in Aleasha's hand drawing hearts across my notebook. In one of them she had written 'I aim to draw hearts on every page :p’ the film ended with a cowboy riding away into the horizon with his damsel in distress. Expectations of a western fulfilled. On the bus home I made notes about Todorov, while trying to see if Aleasha had really drawn hearts on every single page. On the last page Aleasha had drawn a heart and an arrow pointing towards it saying 'my heart.' She had divided it into two sections. In the smaller part she had written 'belongs to other people.' In the bigger part she had written, 'belongs to you.' 

 We were symbiotic after that. She was my first love and I messed that up. I couldn't date anyone, I hadn't. I tried to forget her, and I know it's exaggerating to compare my small life to a cancer patient but I really couldn't kill the memory of her, without killing me. 

I looked at the time. 11.04pm. I could really have done with a late night Mocha at Lee's cafe. It would have only kept me wired, but it would have felt good. The same as heroine really. I started to feel nervous about the future what was it going to be like, the thoughts made my world spin until I found myself bent over puking into the bathroom sink. 

A window closed downstairs. 

I looked into my mother's room, she was sound asleep. Don't go downstairs, that was what would have been shouted if my life was a horror movie. Sadly life, isn't a movie and there are no new equilibriums, we die and the story continues without us.

I slowly walked down stairs into the kitchen, there was no draft from an open window, and I relaxed. I hadn't even realised that up until that point I had stopped breathing. A girl walked past me with bleached blonde hair and a skinny frame, she was wearing a long black trench coat with thin black tights, her platforms made her taller, which made her, seem more powerful. If that moment was a movie scene she would have been shot from a low angle. She opened the cupboard  and fetched a glass, her nails were blood red. She poured a glass of water, took a sip and turned to face me. 

"I'm Athena." She smiled.

Fangs. Fangs. Run. Room. Spinning. Blackness.