Photographs

1 . the beginning of a dramatic story

It was a dark and stormy evening.

Pretty dramatic, I know. But this is a dramatic story. This is a story of how my life... changed, I guess.

I had so many problems in the past, but never like this one. This one, I could never put to rest. It's always there to haunt me.

I guess it started when the storm happened. The storm that occurred for the first time in sixty years in our small, boring town, Hoodbridge.

I was home alone. My parents were on a business trip and they weren't coming back until the next two weeks.

I was watching Pretty Little Liars on my laptop, when all of a sudden, my laptop's screen went black. Its battery has died.

I walked over to charge it. Then I took my phone and scrolled Instagram for a few moments, before my phone's battery died, as well. As you could tell from that, I have a bad habit of not charging my gadgets.

Anyway, after that, I charged my phone then decided to make a snack. I went downstairs to the kitchen and saw that there were some leftover chocolate chip cookies lying on a tray on the kitchen counter that our chef, Eliza, made earlier today.

I had just finished my third cookie when I heard a noise. It sounded like it was coming from above me.

So I checked the whole house, but I couldn't find anything. I was on the fourth floor, where only the attic and a bathroom were. I heard the noise again.

I checked the bathroom. Nothing. So obviously, I checked the attic.

Yes, I know. You're probably screaming at me to just get away from there and stay in my locked bedroom or something. But what you might not understand, because you might not have ever been in this situation before, is the curiosity.

Extreme curiosity is what is telling me to go to that attic. When I went inside, there was a horrible smell. Something rotten. Like someone died in here. Probably just a rat.

The noise was probably just a rat, too. So with that thought, I should go back, right? But there goes that stupid extreme curiosity again.

I only wanted to check out what's in here. I haven't been in there in years. I looked around, explored.

And I found a big, yellow box, with a label on it: Photographs. What came up to my mind was obviously the fact that there were old pictures of me in there and also the fact that I haven't seen those in so long.

So I opened the box and went through the pictures. The first one, there was me and a puppy that I had when I was seven. Its name was Mickey and it was a poodle. Unfortunately, Mickey died two weeks after I got him.

The second picture, though, was weird. There was me, standing between my smiling parents. But beside me (so obviously she was standing beside my parents, too), there was a girl. She was a bit taller than me and was grinning. Her arm was put around me.

We all looked very happy.

Funny. Because I don't remember this girl at all.

No. Not funny. Scary. She was there in the picture, looking like she was very much included in the family, as if she was my... sister, or something.

But it was extremely ridiculous. She couldn't be. Where was she now? As far as I knew, I was an only child.

Maybe I'm thinking too far and she's only a cousin I haven't kept in touch with for so long, that I forgot about her. Maybe she's a family friend. Maybe her parents were friends with my parents.

But I have absolutely no memory of her and it scared me.

I looked more into the pictures. She was there, again. When we were at the zoo... she was petting a baby tiger with me. We were at the park, she was hugging me, while our parents smiled beside us.

As I looked more into the box, I found something else. Not a photograph. A paper.

Drawings. Drawings that I had done. I know because at the bottom left corner of the paper, my name was there.

In the drawing, there was a man, labeled Dad. A woman, labeled Mom. A small child, labeled Me. A taller child, labeled My Sister.

[ a/N: hope you enjoyed the chapter! please vote, it's super easy! just click on the little star and it'll turn orange! and comment what you thought of the chapter. also, i think that this person :

(Sasha Pieterse), should play Madeline. thank you for reading! ]