Roots [Completed]

Chapter 4 - Part 1

They tell me that I started screaming in the ambulance. I don't remember the hours after I stumbled into the police officer's car - but, apparently, I had wordlessly sobbed as she drove to the station, where they discovered that I matched perfectly with a girl that had been reported missing 5 weeks ago.

5 weeks. How could it have been that long?

How could it have only been that short?

I was pale and - and I must have vomited, because there was such a sour taste in my mouth - and the days of starving myself had forced a gauntness into my cheeks that wasn't there before, and I was still and silent in a reverberating shock, and so, of course, an ambulance arrived to take me to the hospital.

The EMT tried to help me into the back, I think, and his hands brushed against my arm, and that is when the screaming began. They say that I confessed to killing a wolf that turned into a girl, that I called myself a murderer and begged them to understand that he made me do it. When they asked who "he" was, the words in my mouth dissolved into senseless blabbering.

The next thing I can clearly remember is my moms, hysterically crying, surrounding me in a hospital bed, gripping my hands so tightly that my knuckles turned white. By then, I was so tired and senseless with relief that I slept for a long, long time.

Police officers asked me questions. When I told them what I saw, they checked my blood for drugs.

After that, I tried not to sound insane. I tried to say his name.

But I couldn't.

So I told them I never knew it.

"There were a lot of people," I told them. "They worked with him. They were on - on his side."

"Did you meet anyone else who was captured, like you?"

I choked on the words. "There was one other."

They looked at me. The police officers, and my mothers.

"She's dead."

I tried to give them a description. She might be another missing person, the officers said. But I started crying, again, and couldn't get the words out.

And then, a few days later, I went home. It seems like so much has changed, but I don't know if anything really has. The house seems so much bigger than before, the rooms much emptier. My eyes feel too old for it to be the same. I feel too old for my house, too old for my life.

But I am too young for it, too. It feels like I have forgotten the very basics of being alive - I have to relearn how to walk, how to talk, how to love: in the first week, I cry more than a newborn child.

I have become a walking prototype of contradicting extremes. I am too old - I am too young - I am too empty and I am overfull.

It is exhausting, so I sleep.

-

A week after I get home, Mom tells me that Preston and Tana are asking after me. They want to come see me.

I tell her that I need more time.

The last time I saw Preston and Tana, I was a different person. I was whole. I spoke without thinking. I could look at myself in a mirror without feeling nauseous.

The day after I got home, I caught myself in my bathroom mirror. The girl looking back at me was strangely ashen and pale - she had wide, broken eyes with panicked irises and dark circles, and her perfect curls had withered, hanging around her face like a veil. It was not me. It can't be me. I stared at her, daring her to blink first, anxiety welling up in my throat like a tsunami.