Death Is My Frenemy (Book Three)

Chapter 4: Your Execution

I didn't understand what my Mom's new boyfriend was trying to do to me at first, the pokes and touching, the stares, but I quickly caught on. He was into kids more than adults. I told my Mom what was going on and she didn't believe me. Her boyfriend hit me when he found out what I had told her. Hard. And then put out his cigarette on my arm. My Mom was standing right there when he did it.

As I said, my family had been really religious-- one of those families that went to church every single weekend, but that didn't change the fact that my Mother was simply idiotic. Finally, around my Freshman year, my Mom finally dumped the dirt bag.

But with the way she had already set up my life, I was bound to turn into that kid that gulps down his first beer at age twelve, which I did.

And that was honestly my problem: drinking. I didn't do it often, but when I did, I would almost always black out and be in some chicks bed in the next morning. There were rumors I messed with drugs. I didn't. Selfishly, I didn't ever want to look like one of those grimy, pale, druggies walking around my Highschool because I knew I at least had my good looks going for me. I was smart, too, I just didn't have the motivation to try hard enough.

Nevertheless, the day of my death, I did do drugs at that Halloween party. Not only drinking, I made one too many other poor decisions. And in the end, I locked myself in the  the party-throwers basement bathroom, miserably alone, where I violently threw up, panicked because I couldn't breathe, and then collapsed to the hard tiled floor seconds later. Dead. Alone. Just like that.

Or at least, that's what I read happened in the newspapers.

The report on my death stated that I had actually died from a heart attack before the drugs, possibly resulting in extreme sexual activities during high intoxication. It made me laugh out loud at first. How the hell the Chicago police had fabricated up that statement, or whether it was actually true; whether an invasive autopsy had been done, involving some sort of scraping method in the dark corners of my body that I just didn't want rubber gloves to touch...

I honestly did not want to know--because I was still walking around in the same body that went through that entire procedure. There was a separate report about my death recorded that I had tightened a rubber tube around my arm and injected myself with heroine multiple times. But no matter how much I tried to picture it, I just couldn't see myself resorting to heroine. Heroine? I was still trying to get use to the bitter taste of wine. It was a little out of my league.

All I wanted in my life was a little get away, not a full-blown addiction drug or some kind of messy, harsh shit that gets you pale as the moon and pissy as a hornet. My death was still a massive mystery, it seemed, and I couldn't remember any of it.

It better have been a mystery, because I had literally gotten up off of a metal, chemical-smelling table in the middle of the night, in an unknown building, and sprinted out into the night, where Malphas would find me collapsed in the dirt, hyperventilating over the fact that I had recalled coming back to life. My body was never buried. My parents individually, being they were both filthy rich, actually sent investigators to find out who had stolen the body. I personally would have guessed it was Ron, my Mothers "touchy" ex, or a Zombie Apocalypse.

Anyways, if it was not the threatening black gaze at my forehead that made me twitch in the damp basement where I stood, it was the unconscious, pale girl held down in the metal chair thirty feet across from me--tied with strong leather bands around the ankles and her wrists. Dirt and grime of the prison the human was kept in scattered along her paled cheeks and blonde hair, which matted heavily with dry blood. Even with a gag placed between her lips she looked entirely at peace. Innocent. Human.