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When Crimson Heights High School let out their students for summer break in late May, they expected for their future senior class of students to return whole. No one ever expected anything bad to happen in Crimson Heights. With a total of one thousand, sixty-five people in the small town, almost everyone knew each other which left little room for major crime.
Yet, on the last week of summer a tragedy happened. Mia Hart, my twin sister was abducted, and drowned to her death in the lake we had been swimming in just hours before. When they found her, her body had washed up on shore. Her dyed blonde hair wet and tangled in a knot as she floated face down. Dark clotted blood evident on the back of her head as a huge gash was exposed.
Devastation lingered in Crimson Heights. The murder of my twin sister broke the hearts of everyone in town, even the ones who never once spoke to her. The biggest room in the funeral home wasn’t enough to hold the people who came to attend the burial. People scattered outside, talking and crying their eyes out on the person’s shoulder besides them and spoke about what a great person my sister was.
That was what I hated about Crimson Heights. Everyone liked to pretend. The people in town, the ones we called ‘friends’ and even family. No one could be trusted, and it seemed I was the only one in this town who knew that, but Mia knew it also. She just liked to pretend she didn’t.
She saw a lot of the things that happened in Crimson Heights but never spoke of them- not even to me. Mia was the type of person who kept leverage on someone to use against them when she needed something. Although many saw my sister as ‘innocent’ she was anything but.
If I was being completely honest, I wasn’t all that surprised to find out my twin was murdered. The way she had been acting the last couple of months, using past events against others in our town to get what she wanted, she angered a lot of people.
She hadn’t been herself.
But then again, she had become such as stranger I didn’t even know who she was.
I found it ironic though, how her last words to me turned out to be truer than she had anticipated as she stormed off into the night.
“The truth may hurt, Malia, but lies kill.”
