“Okay, the day is almost over and nothing’s happened. I’ll be fine…..right?” I was trying to calm myself down by talking to myself, as I usually would, hoping that maybe the more I repeated the lies the more believable they would become. It was the end of the school day already, and for most that would be a big relief, but for me that was rarely the case. They would usually do their worse right after school, when the teachers weren’t looking, when there weren’t any witnesses to back me up; as if anyone would help me anyways. Everyone hated that “psychopathic murderer girl”, even the people who used to be slightly nice to me dared not even look near me for fear of being associated with me and having to endure whatever tortures I had to endure. Amanda was the only one who stayed with me- she was also the only one who didn’t believe that I had killed all those girls that Freddy had actually been killing.
I’m not even 100% sure how the police had begun connecting me to their deaths in the first place. I believe they had some sort of fingerprint evidence of me on one of the girls or something stupid like that, so they had assumed that I had something to do with her and overnight I became the main suspect in multiple, gruesome, murder cases.
I suddenly remembered what I had originally been doing and shook my head from side-to-side, snapping myself out of my thoughts. I continued sorting through the textbooks and sketchbooks I would need for the rest of the day, making deposits of books and papers to withdraw more books and papers. I heard a darkly familiar noise behind me and craned my head just in time to see a large group of teenagers- including the blonde- herding other popular teens. The blonde from lunch was chatting while arm-in-arm with some short haired football jock when she, while giggling to some comment or other, looked over at me. Our eyes met- hers narrowed slightly and she smiled at me the same way I’d seen Freddy smile at some of his victims in their dreams, except hers wasn’t as intense as his was. I felt my eyes grow wide and my jaw drop a slight bit. She cackled, obviously noticing and enjoying my unintentional reaction, and turned her head back to the other teenagers who were also chatting in a slightly low and quick fashion.
I blinked quickly for a short moment, clearing myself of what had just occurred.
“That was…..unusual….” I told myself. I felt the wave of worry and paranoia slam into me so hard I almost felt nauseous right then and there; I might have thrown up had I not to be more focused on trying to stay standing upright. I shook my head….which wasn’t a good idea considering the sudden nausea….. and called myself silly, that I had just imagined the whole thing, that I had just misinterpreted what had happened or was blowing it out of proportion. Yet the little voice that resided in the back of everyone’s consciousness was screaming otherwise.
I crouched down, quickly gathered whatever I had out into my self-designed backpack, gathered the slightly heavy load on my back, stood back up and slammed my locker shut, wincing slightly at the sound, and began quickly walking off, keeping a fast yet steady pace.
I twisted up and down the hallways, trying to avoid bumping into others as much as I could during my slightly frantic dashing away from school. The hallways were clearing out fast of other students, faster than usual; it was a Friday, what could I expect? I never took the bus home because of how the others would sometimes treat me so I had begun walking home sometime earlier in the year. I exhaled a slight bit of relief when the double-doors to the back of the school were in sight, and I made a mad dash for them, hoping to get out of here sooner rather than later. I slammed my body weight, which wasn’t very much, into the doors, thrusting them open with a metallic groaning, only to see them…..many of them….gathered in a half-circle around the stone stairs of which I was standing upon.
I immediately broke out into a cold sweat, my eyes growing wide as the moon, my appendages shaking slightly. I rotated my eyes, not my head, to look around for an escape route of some sort- I could find none. The blonde from lunch stepped out of the half-circle and smiled that same smile she had given me earlier. She spoke in a clear and excited voice.
“Hey there, what’s up?” I stared back at her, not responding and not planning on it. My mouth was dry anyways. She narrowed her eyes in slight frustration of not getting any sort of vocal response.
“What’s this, you’re wondering I’m sure? Oh…nothing much,” she shrugged.
“Just a little get-together me and some friends are having…… say, would you like to join? I’ll be sure you’re the center of attention.” She laughed a cold, harsh laugh. I slowly moved my hand to the door handle behind me and tried it- locked. Must be one of those doors that lock from the outside whenever closed but still open on the inside…… She suddenly cut off her laugh to glare at me again, hatred extremely apparent in her cold eyes.
“I told you you would get what’s comin to ya…….alright, stone the bitch!” She announced to rest of group. I watched her melt back into the others when suddenly a sharp pain in my side occurred. I winced and looked to see what had happened- a small stone was clattering to the ground. My eyes were huge at that point. Stone the bitch! Echoed in my head as another small stone hit me in the other side. Then another. Then a few more at once. Rapidly it turned into an onslaught of sharp pains, clattering, and harsh laughter.
I hid myself the best I could behind my backpack, thankful for its bulkiness, while I frantically looked around for a way out, any way out. The sharp pains continued, the stones coming closer and closer to my head. I looked around frantically when I suddenly noticed a sharp gleaming coming from shortly behind an incredibly thin boy when he shifted his weight to gather more stones. When I looked closer I saw it was a small window to the inside of the school, the basement area. A well-sized stone hit me sharply in the back of the head. I became disoriented for a split second, but the pain didn’t really come like I had expected it to, it was more of a numb throbbing sensation. ‘Well, I have no plan whatsoever, and no way out of this except for a small chance on one- what the hell?’ I thought. I stood up very quickly from where I had been crouching against the doors and launched my hefty backpack towards the frail boy- he gave a slight squeal of surprise and jumped to the side to dodge it. Now or never…..
I vaulted over the metal handrails that were on the side of the cement stairs and made a manic dash towards the window. More pains shot through me at every angle now, and because I was running some were hurting much more than others.
“Don’t let the bitch get away!” The blonde commanded of the others. They began crowding at the small break I had made in their half-circle and the stones were thrown harder. I ducked down and skidded between their legs, something Freddy had taught me to do, and scrambled over to the small window. I heard the many loud patters of their feet racing towards me- I knew that if they caught me I might actually end up dead. I had a split second to act: I braced myself a millisecond before kicking the small window as hard as I could, the adrenaline pounding in my veins making me strong enough to actually break through. The sound of the glass shattering was beautiful music to my ears- the amazingly searing pain in my leg was not so great. I screamed at the pain, but had to ignore it, for they were almost right at me, the rocks thudding against my body harder and harder. I ducked down to climb through the tiny window, and just as I did one specifically large stone nailed me right between the vertebrae of my back.
The pain was intense, but I knew that I had to get away now or else the pain would be a lot more intense. I dove, legs first, through the window and crashed on top of many boxes with pointy and hard objects inside. I recovered and scrambled underneath the boxes, having no idea what could possibly be inside, and covered myself up with them. I hunched over and hugged my legs tightly to my chest, my tense muscles screaming in an agonizing protest at the movement, in an attempt to make myself even smaller of a target if they could still get me from here. I listened closely; I heard more stones being thrown, a few grunts and growls of anger and frustration, the blonde, it sounded, cursing heavily in the background noise. All these sounds lasted a long while. I stayed, crouched under the boxes, in a moment of safety, beginning to really breathe again when I realized that they couldn’t hurt me under here.
I felt something warm and wet soaking into my clothing. I looked to see what it might be, thinking maybe something was dripping from one of the boxes: I looked to see a dark stain growing on my leg, the ground, and towards the rest of me. I was bleeding heavily. I rolled up my pant legs and the sight of the large gashes the glass had made on my legs brought back much of the intensity of pain that the adrenaline had warded off. I whimpered and whined like a beaten puppy at the acute pains and aches and the simultaneous pulsing my body shared with every limb, like a single heart beating to its own accord. Despite the dim lighting I was able to tell I must be absolutely covered in bruises, cuts, scrapes, gashes, and dried and wet blood when I glanced at my arms and shirt. The pain became more intense as I sat there, nonmoving, and I held my tongue from screaming in agony, afraid that they would find a way down here and get me here too, or afraid of giving up my hiding spot.
After what felt like hours the pinging of rocks came to a complete halt, the murmurs of the frustrated teens were silenced, and the sound of feet shuffling was no longer heard except for far off in the distance. I stayed where I was for a moment longer, then deciding that it was safe to emerge from my spot now, did just so. My muscles were tight and stiff. I felt totally exhausted in every form of the word, and when I stood up had to grasp on the nearest object to catch myself from crashing to the floor. After a few moments I felt well enough to stand on my own, but my body shook and jerked weakly as I walked.
I looked around myself and found a large wooden pole. I grabbed it and broke the rest of the glass off from the edges of the window. When the tinkling of glass shards hitting the hard floor had ceased I brought myself up to the window and hauled my body through, still getting one or two more cuts from the impossible to remove shards that were left clutching to the window frame. I stood up, slowly and carefully, and looked around. It was getting dark, the sun almost completely dissolved from the sky, so at least I had a small idea of about how long I was down there. Something in my head clicked, despite its fogginess, and I scanned the scene for my backpack, which was not to be found. I sighed with the despair of the loss of my sketchbooks, but at least they had gone down with a great purpose.
I began limping home, keeping as much body weight off of my more severely injured leg as I could, but I could tell I’d already lost a lot of blood since I felt numb, slightly dizzy, and disoriented, so it was hard to focus on keeping body weights from one to the other in the first place. I merged to the street lamp lit sidewalk and dragged along there. A gust of chilled wind blew, but it felt positively freezing to me as my once-warm, wet, bloodstained clothes clung to my skin, absorbing and intensifying the instances of the outside chill to a wintery temperature. I hugged myself for warmth and glanced behind me, noticing that I left a barely noticeable trail of crimson as I limped along. I scoffed sarcastically at myself then tilted my head in questioning as to why the blood was funny in the first place. I stopped and stared at a street light: it was purely entrancing.
Everything else started becoming out of sight, not of any importance but to add to the darkness that was already in my line of vision, till only a small pinpoint of the bright light remained. I snapped back to myself for a short enough moment to realize that I was no longer standing up but rather that I was sideways…..how did I get sideways? I giggled. My body throbbed harder, but I felt no more pain, just felt like I was weightless, like nothing material of my body was left, just my soul flying from my body and dancing in the air, dancing gleefully in the bright, pure, beautiful light that was my world now. I saw nothing else but the small light and the black surrounding it. I felt a little bit sadder as the light was getting smaller and smaller, the black creeping up at a fair and fast pace on the light. I wanted to yell at the blackness, to tell it to go away so that I could look at the light longer, but my mouth was too numb to use anyways. I took one last longing stare at the brightness until the darkness fully enclosed and I lost all consciousness.