Mr. Xiong and Mr. Smith, my biology teacher, approached to help us. Mr. Xiong picked me up from the dumpster and helped me out. “How are you feeling, Sarah? Can you walk?”
No, I feel weak, and I might faint any second. “I’m all right.”
“Do you want to see the nurse?”
“No, I’m okay. Thank you.”
“I’m sorry this happened to you,” Principal Anders said, but despite everything, he didn’t sound too concerned. He seemed like he wanted to solve this situation as quickly and covertly as possible. “I’ll make sure the perpetrators are properly punished.”
I wanted to snort at that, completely doubting it, but nothing I did or said would change the fact that some people around here were privileged and some were not.
“Are you able to go to your last period?” Anders asked Jessica and me, and I was relieved that he wasn’t forcing us to go to his office too.
Jessica looked completely lost and unable to say a word. It was clear that she was in shock and couldn’t understand what had just happened. I couldn’t understand it myself, but I managed to find something in me that helped me stay sane through this.
I put my arm around her shoulders, surprised at how fragile she felt. Her shivers gave her inner struggle away, so I squeezed her hand to let her know she wasn’t alone.
“If it’s okay with you, I’d like to take Jessica to the counselor. She isn’t okay.”
“I see. All right, then you two are excused from your last period.” He faced Blake. “Boys, to my office.”
Masen and Blake followed Anders and the teachers to the school. I couldn’t stop quivering, wanting nothing more than to be far away from here. I could only hope they would at least get detention.
Josh approached me, exuding deranged vibes that paralyzed me, and got into my face. He grabbed the wrist that Natalie had twisted this morning, cutting my circulation short. I whimpered in sheer pain, about to beg him to let me go.
“This isn’t over yet,” he snarled. “Not by a long shot.”
Chapter 16
“I MISS YOU, KAY. IT feels like it’s been forever since I last saw you. There are days when I wake up after a terrible nightmare... You would be in it and you would bleed again... There would be so much blood, and I would keep screaming.”
“You would say such horrible things, things that somehow feel true. You’d say that everything was my fault . I was supposed to die then, not you or Hayden. You had such a bright future. You were a gem. You had such perfect dreams, and you wanted to help the world. Who am I? Nobody. I’m just some coward who desperately clings to her own dreams so she can escape her demons.”
I knelt on the ground, holding onto Kay’s headstone. I read the epitaph poem on the stone so many times, yet it managed to strike me to the core even now.
“Breaking into pieces, bleeding so deep,
wishing I was the one who went into eternal sleep.
You’ll never be forgotten, you pure soul,
you left a crushing emptiness, you left an immense hole.
Rest in peace, my dear brother, and sleep tight,
know that I’ll always love you with all my might.”
Hayden wrote this soon after the funeral with a permanent marker.
“Even this year, there is nothing new I can tell you... I wish I could finally come here and say ‘Hey Kay, I became stronger, I conquered my demons, and I fought against my tormentors.’ I think you would be so proud of me because of that, right?”
“You, for some reason, always believed in me. You always thought I was strong and would find a way to save myself—not only from others, but from myself as well. I want to be strong. Not only for myself. I have a new friend, and I think you’d like her. Everything is pretty new since we’ve just met, but I have a feeling she’s a really good person.”
My tears kept flowing, and the pressure built in my chest. It was so difficult to breathe as I kept sobbing, curled into a ball. I pressed my head on my knees, trying to find some comfort.
The sky was becoming darker as the sun went lower, which painted it in various shades of purple, while the wind whispered softly in the distance.
“Today was an awful day. This isn’t only about me anymore but about Jessica too. She has to suffer too, and she seems so fragile... I don’t know what happened to her in her previous school, but I don’t want her to become like me. Dark and lost. She still has that light inside of her, that innocence, that faith that the world is a bright place.”
“Me? For me the world is a despicable place, filled with degenerate rats that live for nothing more than to make you bleed and watch you wither away slowly. People are corrupt. They want to witness your downfall because that is the only way they can bear their own hell.”
“How can there be goodness when there is so much hate? How can you forgive a person and give them a second chance when all they ever do is crush you over and over again? How can you wish them happiness when they don’t care about yours?”
I looked at the grazes on my forearms, unable to comprehend the venom that led Natalie to do this. Her love for Kayden had turned into something utterly frightful, her unhappiness seeping into me with each punishment she subjected me to.
“I’m afraid of Natalie. She’s unstable, and it’s frightening me because it feels so real. And I don’t know what to do to avoid it. She wants me to pay for your death, but I’m already paying for it. I’ve been paying for it since the moment you died, and the pain never goes away. I go to sleep with it. I wake up with it. I smile with it. It doesn’t go away .”
The suffocating sobs kept coming, and I couldn’t breathe anymore as anxiety drew me in its stifling cocoon. I felt the tingling in the back of my head and soon enough, it spread through my whole head.
“On top of everything, there is Hayden. Hayden hates me and there is nothing beyond that. You were wrong, Kay. You were so wrong.”
The image from this Saturday came into my mind, along with that memory of the day of Kayden’s funeral... So much pain...
“Can you imagine how it feels to get hurt again and again, and the bully simply doesn’t care? Nothing. They make you bleed and there is no remorse, no pain, nothing. They don’t care about you. You can die and there would be nothing. Nothing .”
I held my head on my lap, keeping my eyes squeezed shut, but saying these words out loud didn’t relieve my pain like I thought it would. It made it stronger.
“I was so wrong about Hayden. I was giving him another chance and then another chance. I was always, somehow, justifying his cruelty. I thought he was suffering and lonely, just like me.”
“I actually wanted to help him. Even after all those things he’d done to me, I wanted to be strong for him and wipe away our darkness. I wanted to forget everything and be there for him, without asking for anything in return. You would say I was selfless, but now I know it was foolish. You can’t build castles out of thin air. Things get annihilated so easily, yet it can take centuries to build them again.”
“Do you know what you can’t build anymore? The lost trust.”
I was still resting my head on my lap, trying to calm down my breathing. A dull pain in my chest refused to go away, but the tears had finally stopped. I raised my head and read the words again.