CHAPTER 5:
I gently awoke somewhere I had never seen before. My head was killing me and I felt like my body was shaking. I rubbed my neck-sore. What happened the day before?
I couldn’t remember.
Something with Derek, that’s all I remember. My vision was becoming clearer and I vaguely remember what I was doing here. I walked myself back to the house I remember going into, and I let myself back in. My face was attacked with a strong stench. It smelled like death and it was horrible.
I scrounged around looking for my phone. Dried blood was everywhere, and I was sick to my stomach. I couldn’t find my phone, and used the one in the house to call for help. I called my house phone and my mom picked up right away.
“Hello,” her voice off and worried.
“Mom”
“Adrianna,” she stuttered, “is it really you?”
“Mom, I don’t know where I am. I need help,” I lied. I knew where I was but I walked outside casually like nothing was happening. I explained to her the signs that I saw and she gave directions to police officers. I sat around for a short while until uniformed men arrived around the block in search of me. They came over to me asking questions and escorting me to the vehicle, and my mind was absent the entire time.
The ride home was fairly long, and I had plenty to think about. I would have been able to keep my thoughts straight if these uniforms wouldn’t stop bugging me. I tried my best to remember, but last night was too hazy for me to clear up-I must’ve been drunk. I remember one thing clearly.
Drinking wine.
I was clueless to why I had been drinking wine, but that’s the event I remember the most. Everything else was in bits and pieces, not making sense, or just seeming out of place. It was like four different puzzles mixed up together, but they all seemed to look alike and you didn’t know how to separate any of it. Somehow I finally realized last night wasn’t a normal party. It wasn’t normal at all.
“Miss, you’re home. If you need we can walk you inside,” the first uniform said. The second one chimed in with the same response.
I politely declined the offer and stepped out of the squad car door that was held open for me. Hesitantly, I walked up to the familiar door that I’d been living with my whole life. I reached for the door, noticing a small scratch on the white paint right above it. I scratched at it, wondering where it came from. Maybe when mom came home with groceries in her hand and missed the lock with her key and hit the paint instead.
I turned the knob, hearing an odd clicking sound that I never heard before. What was it coming from? Probably inside, I thought. My thoughts were completely jumbled up and confused. I was thinking about things that weren’t even important. I was noticing things I shouldn’t be. I was hearing weird sounds that no one else did. Something was happening to me.
If I could only remember what happened at that party!
But I couldn’t, and it was frustrating. I couldn’t remember anything! The door creaked open, and my mom was sitting in a chair, watching the door. My head poked in, and she squirmed out of her seat and jumped on me. “Ouch,” I muttered.
“Do you need to go to the hospital,” she started. Then she muttered something to herself and began again, “Of course you do. Come on, sweetie, let’s go.” She pulled on my arm, but I didn’t budge. “I said let’s go,” she repeated.
“I don’t need the hospital, I just need to sleep. I’m tired and I need to figure out what happened.”
“Well the police are going to be questioning you on what exactly happened, and-”
“That’s why I need rest, mom! I need to see if I can remember anything that happened. My brain is confused, you aren’t helping, and I just want to get some sleep!” I pulled away and headed up the stairs. I didn’t plan on sleeping at all.
I locked my door and got out notebook and pen. I wrote down what I did remember. I forced my eyes shut and thought. I drank wine. I was with Derek. There was…a party. My eyes flashed open and I wrote it all down.
Drank wine
With Derek
At a party
So I drank wine with Derek at a party? No, I was drunk. It would take a lot of wine to get drunk. Plus, I don’t think it was a sophisticated dinner party. Was there beer? Think, Adrianna, think! Beer, was there beer? Yes. How much beer? Think, Adrianna. There were…ping pong balls? What the hell was I thinking? Why would there be ping pong balls at a…wait!
Beer Pong.
They were playing beer pong. That’s why I got so drunk. So, let me put this all together: I was at a party with Derek and there was beer and wine. Everyone was playing beer pong, and I got wasted-apparently.
Then what?
Knock. Damn it, I lost my train of thought when my mom knocked on my door. Why couldn’t she leave me alone?
“What,” I hollered at the door. She tried to open it, but was stuck because of the lock. I got up and unlocked it.
“Honey, do you want something to eat?”
“No, mom,” I was hungry, but I didn’t want to eat. “Can I just have something to drink?”
“I’ll bring up a sandwich too, just in case you want it.”
Okay, back to thinking. What else was there? I don’t know. I closed my eyes and scrunched up my eyebrows to see if I could remember anything else from last night. Darkness was all I saw. Light flashed in front of my eyes and I remembered Derek and I…kissing? Not likely. Let’s just go with it Dri, I thought to myself. I wrote it down.
Knock. “Honey, I have your food and drink.” She laid it next to me. She started to leave, but stopped in her tracks. “Before I forget, I need to know how much longer you are going to be out of school so I can keep getting your work dropped off at the house.”
She was really thinking about school after I didn’t come home for one night. I needed rest, not school. Or homework. I didn’t even want to go back to school after what happened. Homeschooling, now that sounded nice. I’d practically been traumatized and she was worrying about my school work? I would make it up over the weekend, I had plenty of time.
“Mom, I missed one day. How bad could that be? I mean, I think I only had one test and maybe three homework assignments at most. And I-” She cut me off.
“Honey, how long do you think you’ve been gone?”
“Umm, a day,” I was sure of it.
“Honey, you’ve been gone for almost two weeks. Some people thought you were dead. God, when people asked me what I thought of my daughter being dead, I wanted to die too. We didn’t know what to think, and I was scared you were never coming home. At first, the police thought you were just a runaway after we found that you weren’t in your room in the morning. Then after a while they told us that either you would have made a blip in their radar or contacted home. They wrote you up as a missing person’s case, and we’ve been looking for you this whole time.
“We have been scared looking for you, and I honestly didn’t know what to do. I called and texted your phone, and even had the police try and track it. Nothing. Nothing for two weeks and I was out of my mind worried about you. It scared me like hell and I didn’t know anything! Why did you say you thought you were gone for only one day? Did it only seem like one day to you? What happened, honey? Do your best at explaining what happened.” She sat down on my bed and rubbed a spot she wanted me to sit in like we were going to have a mother-daughter bonding moment. This was far from a bonding moment.
“Mom,” I sighed, “I don’t remember anything. I swear. Well, I remember one thing. I was at a party…and I got drunk.” I saw her hold in her breath “That’s all I remember, I swear. Then I woke up in a street and my head hurt, and my brain was throbbing. It felt like someone ran over my body with a bulldozer. I called you immediately after I found a phone and that’s all I remember. Like I said, I’ve only been gone a day.”
That was when I realized I had been gone over a week; I looked over at my calendar on the wall. My mom ripped of the month of February. It was now March. What happened to it only being a day? If it was more than a week I should have remembered something else. How could I have been unconscious for almost two weeks?
I came back to reality and my mother (or what looked like my mother) was staring at me with dead eyes. No soul in the beautiful hazel; no sign of life. All that seemed to be in her eyes was death. Something darker than death from what I saw, and I didn’t like the sight of it.
Death.
Something seemed too familiar. Death was starting to seem normal. But it wasn’t. Why was I okay with this?
My mom placed a warm hand on my arm and smiled, with death still in her eyes. She tried to push emotion into them, but all that came was sadness. She tried her best to deal with me missing for the past week, and after I finally came back she still thought I was dead.
“Mom,” I whispered “your hands are so warm. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey, I should be asking you that question because your skin is cold as ice.” I was as cold as ice? I didn’t feel nor look cold. My mother must have been really delusional or something because she is the one that was warm. Maybe she had a fever.
“Mom, I think you need to lay down because you might be sick.” I pulled her to her room and laid her down for some well-needed rest.
I returned to my room, puzzled. How could I have been gone for almost two weeks? I looked in the mirror.
I had makeup on, freshly done. My hair was well in order. Something was off and I wanted to know what. I remembered some of the events from the party clearly, but nothing after that. I stared at myself straight into the eyes, and I didn’t see Adrianna. I don’t even know who I saw anymore. Something died in me, and it wasn’t coming back.
I saw, in the mirror, piled up textbooks on my desk. I figured if I was going to attempt to go back to school, at least try to be prepared, right? I mean if you go to school, you always need to be prepared with something to write with, and your homework. That’s how most people ended up passing school. I walked over and grabbed them.
Inside, there were notes from the students. No one ever talked to me, so why were they writing me? I opened an envelope, and inside was a small page with a letter on it signed by Ethan; the guy I never thought would talk to me. I was too much of a loser, and he was too popular. I gently pulled the page corners to open the folded papers.
Adrianna, you being gone feels weird. I hope what they say about you being dead isn’t true. You are a great person and always think positively. Please come back, everyone is worried about you.
Xoxo, Ethan. (And all the rest of us)
The rest of the letter was signed by the whole junior class, and some others I didn’t recognize. I guess when everyone thinks you’re dead, you aren’t a loser anymore. That was nice to know. Maybe I should go and die more often so everyone would be at least civil to me. I looked over the letter again, and I didn’t see Lynn’s name or her posse’s anywhere. Well, she always did tell me she wished I was dead.
She got what she wished for, for about a week. Now she was going to have to look me straight in the eye tomorrow because that is when I was going back to school-undead and ready for action.
There was that word again. Death.