Angelic (Book 2)

Fourteen

            Do you not deserve this?

            Now there was a voice, tiny but there, that said, No, I don’t.

            “Sit down and take it, Ellie,” was what everybody always told me. “It’ll get better. Endure. Just sit down and take the hits.”

            No.

            No more of that.

            I couldn’t protect Tia because I did what she told me to do. Because I cowered from my abilities and hid beneath her shadow. Hid beneath everybody’s shadow. And when I did end up killing someone or maiming them, or even something of a lesser caliber, the guilt threatened to outdo me. Perhaps this was my flaw.

            My name was Ellie Armstrong, and I was a genetically-modified human being. I was brought to life on accident the way I was. Completely unauthorized to live in the world, hunted down by a radicalistic group that formed explicitly because of me, and the government’s dirty little secret.

            Enough.

            Enough.

            I couldn’t protect Jim or Esme because I allowed August to tuck me away within a safe house. I endangered my friends just by being around, selfishly remaining with them even though I fully knew protecting me was like one man trying to stop a tornado. Impossible; defied nature.

            My own mind eroded under the weight of perpetual guilt that never left. Guilt I permitted to linger around my very being. Take away that guilt and who was I?

            Your sister.

            But, no. I was not Angel. I was Ellie Armstrong. Nineteen years old. I liked milkshakes, and eighties movies, driving down the highway in the middle of the night with my arm hooked out the window of August’s Corvette, the radio turned off, smiling up at the jet-black sky.

            Enough.

            Why should I hide? Why should I feel guilt over who I was? Why should I deprive my own self from flourishing and thriving, and doing more than just getting through the day? We deserved the right to surpass survival. Just surviving was no fun.

            I should know. It was all I’d ever done the nineteen years I’d been alive.

            Not now.

            Not now.

            Enough.

            But the epiphany came too late. Too late to pull my feet from the edge. Too late to clear my mind of self-deprecating thoughts.

            Too late to make me believe I was better alive than dead.

            If I was going to go, though, at least I would have the satisfaction of going with my dignity. Going, knowing I was me and all me, and not hiding under somebody else’s shadow.

            The letter, however outlandish, stated this the best I could:

            Dear friends,

                        You have been nothing but helpful to me over the course of these last few months, and I am nothing but grateful. However, there comes a time when you have to take some sort of responsibility for yourself, and I feel that time has come for me.