Problems

|| Chapter 8 ||

Alex woke up that night screaming again. He immediately clapped a hand to his mouth and closed his eyes, praying.

Please let John not hear, please let John not hear, pleasepleaseplease-

"Alex?"

Fuck.

"I'm fine," Alex whispered, "it was just a bad dream." You sound like a 4 year old.

"M'kay," John murmered groggily, and rolled over. He started snoring softly again in a few minutes.

Alex breathed a sigh of relief and looked over at his alarm clock. It read 1:30 AM. He could still try to sleep for a little bit.
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Alex opened his eyes. The gray morning light filtered through the stillness. It was quiet. Really quiet. He sat up and looked around. There was nobody in sight.

Alexander got up and started walking. The ground was littered with objects, fragments of people's loves scattered everywhere. Branches and leaves were among the belongings; the hurricane had not been gentle.

His foot came down on something...soft. Alex glanced down-

A scream ripped from his throat.

Staring back at him was the blank eyes of a young girl. Her lips were blue; her skin, gray and purple.

Isabel. He knew her.

They had been friends at the orphanage. Alex had given her the nickname Izzie and helped her with her schoolwork, they had sat together at mealtimes.

And now she was dead.

Alex stared back at her body, her neck at an unnatural angle. Her eyes gazed past him. Those eyes would haunt him for the rest of his life.
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This time when Alex woke up, he felt bile rising in his throat. He threw back the covers and rushed to the bathroom, gagging.

He pushed up the toilet seat, held his hair back and threw up, his eyes watering. When he was finished he rested his forehead on the lip of the toilet, the porcelain cool against his skin.

He curled up on the bath mat, fighting waves of nausea. Isabel's eyes seem to be seared into his retinas, and Alex winced. Guilt rushed over him; he shouldn't have been the one to survive. He deserved to be dead.

He was weak.

What kind of eighteen year old do you think you are, Alex? You still have nightmares like a toddler.

He stood shakily and dug around in the cabinet, trying to make as little noise as possible. He didn't want John to walk in on him.

He found the bottle of sleeping pills and slowly turned them over in his hand; he had been trying to slowly wean himself off of them, but that obviously wasn't working.

He shook two pills out into his palm.

What if you didn't stop? What if you just kept going until the whole bottle was gone?

The world would be better off without you.

Alex dropped the bottle as though he had been burned.

He wasn't supposed to still be thinking like that.

And yet...Alex was comfortable thinking that way. It was what he was used to, as sad as that sounded.

He slowly picked up the pill bottle and put it back, then turned off the light and walked back to his bed. John was still sleeping, snoring softly under the pile of blankets he was cocooned in.