May 5th
"Three more weeks, that's all you need and then you can attend graduation and be able to start classes at the state college in the fall. Don't mess this up for yourself, you can still salvage what's left of your senior year if you do well on your finals."
The guidance counselor droned on about my future while I still wondered if there was any point to putting in any effort at all whatsoever considering my almost failing marks in every class besides journalism. The only reason I had been accepted into state college was due to my conditional acceptance before Adam's death nine months prior, and I was surprised it hadn't been pulled considering my lackluster performance in the aftermath.
My mother had said she sent in a letter describing my 'situation' and that the acceptance committee had been 'most understanding' according to their correspondence with her.
"I'm not even sure I want to go there anymore. I'd rather go to the community college for the first two years, it's cheaper that way anyway."
Mr. Salina narrowed his yellowing, withered eyes in my direction and although I knew his concern for me came from a good place, his methods were unorthodox to say the least in making students do whatever he 'advised'.
I wasn't having it that day, however, and I heaved a breathy sigh as I averted my eyes from his judgmental bushy eyebrows and paid more attention to the dust particles floating in the air made prominent from the beaming sunlight streaming in through the window to the left of the desk in front of me.
There were hundreds of them, if not thousands, and some even sparkled in the bright yellow light as my mind catapulted me back to that fated day in August almost a year ago. Instead of air, the dust was floating in water so dark it was almost black, and there were millions of tiny specks of life leeching minerals.
Nothing could live in that water because of how rich in minerals it was, an irony not lost on me and the boy that had died in it.
My attention snapped back to my guidance counselor tapping his brittle fingers on his cherry oak desk in front of me, the lines on his time weathered face pulled down into a bitter frown.
The disappointment in his stare was thick with callous discontentment and finally I relented.
"Fine, I'll study for my finals. Can I leave now?"
The change in his appearance was immediate and I would have laughed had it not been my life that he was pressuring me into changing course with.
"Great, I've set up a few after school tutoring sessions with our math and science labs since you seem to be doing better in history and english. Mr. Anderson will be overseeing those classes as part of his extra credit, I trust you two will get along and not cause anymore disruptions like the last time?"
I internally cringed at his words, remembering the last time Beck Anderson and I were in the same room together.
He still blamed me for his brother's death and I didn't blame him as I still had crippling nightmares about that day, the guilt weighing heavily on my chest.
Mr. Salina, however, didn't seem to care about my obvious objections to this as he handed me the list of times that I was signed up for in the tutoring lab and I gave him a mock salute as I escaped his smirking presence.
I breathed a sigh of defeat and relief as I made my way down the almost deserted hallway of the high school that I was soon to be rid of in a few short weeks.
Being one of the oldest seniors at the school as my eighteenth birthday had already occurred the past September, I was more than ready to get on with my life at college and finally be rid of the same people who'd made my life an absolute living hell since Adam's death.
The shrill final bell rang out through the hallway and I tried as hard as I could to get outside before the teenagers began flowing through the school noticed me, but the strong shoves and dirty looks outran me and so I grit my teeth together and dealt with it for a few hundred feet until my hands finally reached my locker.
The whispers and stares began the day I decided to return to school after Adam's death a month after it happened. I had gotten permission to have my homework brought to me prior to that and I had been a recluse, stuck in my reverie of grief and survivor's guilt.
Apparently since Adam and I had been swimming on private government property, a concerned neighbor had spotted Adam's black pickup truck near the swimming hole and called the police who got there just in time along with the fire department to save me, but for Adam it had been too late.
He had already sunk down far below, down to the depths where old cars had been pushed in and drowned, down where bodies had probably been hidden.
The disgusted looks of the police and fire department and EMT's coupled with my parent's disappointment was enough to quench my need for punishment for the time being, but the reaction of our small community was more than I could have bargained for.
People who I had thought were my close friends since childhood had turned on me, calling me a killer and blaming me for Adam's death.
My first day back at school had been a wake up call as all of the hatred started slow, but once Beck Anderson returned after two months of grieving his twin's death, the popular king of the school's fury fueled the rage pointed towards me as the culprit of Adam's demise.
Then the name calling began. Killer. Murderer. Bitch. I could handle the glares and the words. But then the physical abuse began and I didn't realize how cruel people could be until one Monday morning when I walked into school to being shoved and pushed every which way until I made it to my locker.
Where the color should have been a pristine royal blue, my locker was stained with a bright scarlet red, and I didn't know it at the time but there were talks of putting actual pigs blood on it instead of just regular old paint.
The main culprits of my abuse were Beck's three best friends: Rafael Vicks, Jordan Hayes, and Michael DuBois. Naturally, with all of their good looks and status in the school, their girlfriends and their friends and then all of their acquaintances started a vendetta against me to transfer schools, but I supposed I was a glutton for punishment seeing as though I had made it almost the entire school year without dropping out.
I had almost started to believe all of the nasty things they said to me, but the lies they continued to spew about the day that it happened boiled my skin.
"I heard she was in love with him and tried to get him to sleep with her but when he said no, she drowned him."
"Well I heard that she was a psycho and when he told her he wanted to date her friend Sadie, she went crazy and said 'if I can't have you, no one can!'"
"I heard that he tried to rape her so she pushed him off of a cliff and he hit his head on the way down!"
Of course, it didn't help that the quarry was so large and so deep that the rescue teams had failed to find Adam's body so the rumor mill remained rampant as search parties tried relentlessly to find his body so his family could have proper closure but the last person to see his descending body had been me.
A body crashing into mine and shoving me to the ground brought me out of my terrorizing thoughts as I came face to face with honey dark skin and brown hair almost the shade of cherry wood.
Michael DuBois stared down at me in contempt.
"Watch it, freak."
It didn't matter that I was the one standing still or that he was the one walking towards me, it was always my fault.
My long, dark brown almost black hair that had warranted my namesake of 'raven' whooshed in front of my face as I struggled to regain my things that had been flung to the ground and I wondered if I would ever escape the connotation of my title as 'killer'.
In the corner of my eye, I saw Beck strolling down the hall with his brunette girlfriend Lia in tow and I was about to avert my eyes as quickly as possible until something behind them caught my eye.
I didn't know if it was a trick of the light, but behind them shadowed by the dark looming clouds of the late afternoon, I spotted someone through the glass doors of the high school.
Someone I thought I'd only see again through the guise of his twin brother, a different soul in the same body.
White shirt, dark denim jeans and his black high tops with scribbles all over the white toes of both shoes in black permanent ink, his appearance was exactly as it had been the last day I'd seen him alive.
It wasn't our intention to go swimming at the blue hole that day, but adventure had always been Adam's favorite hobby, and I was all too willing to go along with it.
I didn't want to admit it to myself then, but I was so in love with Adam that I would have jumped off of a bridge if he wanted me to...hell, I had jumped off of a cliff into treacherous waters and almost killed myself trying to save his life in the process.
The truth was, I would have done anything for that boy, and seeing him in front of me forced me to want to go to him.
I blinked once, twice, then three times to try to get his image out of my head. He was still there
Surely there was no way it could be real. I gathered my things quickly and shut my locker door in a haste and almost made it past Beck and Lia to get to Adam, but they quickly stopped me.
An antagonistic smirk that held no joy stared back at me as I attempted to pull my arm out of his rough grasp.
Tingles that I didn't welcome raced up my arms and I blinked hard to get the feeling to go away. He shared Adam's jovial features but his blue eyes held no mirth that used to stare back at me everyday.
I didn't know what I felt when Beck touched me, but it was nothing like how it felt when Adam touched me. With Beck, it was all goosebumps and a fear fluttering in my stomach, but with Adam there was a gentle fluttering, almost like the easy flapping of a bird's wings high above the ground in flight.
I didn't want to feel anything for Beck, let alone flutters of any kind, but it was harder than I thought to put my feelings in the back corner of my mind when he shared sweet and gentle Adam's face.
"Where are you going so fast, freak?" Lia hissed, her dragon eyes staring down at me with no empathy whatsoever. I wondered what could make people so hateful but I finally realized that it was the mob mentality. It was easier to hate and bully someone when everyone else did it and made it socially acceptable to do so as well.
"None of your business. Let me go or I swear to god-"
"You'll what? Kill me?"
I saw red and I could picture myself head butting her pretty little face and making her nose spill red blood with my fist but a frantic gaze behind them showed me Adam's retreating figure and I fought with all of my might to escape Beck's grasp.
Finally I freed myself and escaped before he could utter a single word to me and I ran the rest of the way out of the hallway and pushed open the double glass doors only to find Adam was no where in sight.
Either I was going crazy, or someone was playing a very sick joke on me, but I had a sinking feeling that my mind was playing the biggest joke of all.