"Pretty girls like you get lost in these woods all the time, Alexa."
On the night of Sebastián's annual Beginning of Summer Bash, amiable and adventurous Melody Tryniski went missing. What might have appeared as a juvenile escapade - a casual incide...
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IT COMES AT MIDNIGHT, the presence of Death. It's a burning sensation in my chest, a pain so sharp that it stabs my lungs with a slow yet measured pace. My chest inflates and deflates like the pumping of a raging heart, searching for the air I can feel on my skin but not inside of me. It feels like holding my breath for too long, forgetting that I'm able to breathe. I'm depraving myself from air, encapsulating myself in an imaginary box where I'm drowning on the thing that's supposed to keep me alive.
All I can see around me is darkness, engulfing me, making me part of its meaningless void. I can feel myself slipping from the edge of sanity, floating in the very thing that I need to survive and, oh God, I can't breathe. My chest constricts the more I gasp for air, and I hear my body producing a strange chocking noise. It's as if I'm not here at all; a mere spectator to my own agony.
There's poison coming from the atmosphere that's settling in my room, and I'm waiting for its sting to turn everything inside of me dark; malicious.
The room begins to spin around me, all my belongings morphing into strange creatures - a trick of the eyes, a game for the unconscious part of my brain. My eyes frantically roam around the spinning room, searching for something, anything that can alleviate this momentary pulse of insanity. And, with every spin that passes and every nauseous swirl in my stomach, I can sense that someone's here with me.
Maybe this is how Melody felt during her last moment, alone and scared and surrounded by darkness. Maybe I'm the next name in the killer's list, another young girl to add to their macabre desires. Goosebumps dot around my skin, icy knives blooming from my flesh. My chest dilates to swallow the burning poison in desperate need to find oxygen's replacement. The fear is all-consuming, all-powerful, paralyzing me in a state of shock - electrifying as it courses through my veins and cold as it swims in my blood, beneath my warm flesh.
I part my chapped lips to scream for my father, shout to whoever's here to leave me alone, but all I can manage is a soft breath. My hands clutch the sheets draping over me, tightening their hold as my eyes flutter shut. Then, behind my eyelids, behind the very darkness created by me, flashes appear in a disarray of images.
Pale hands clutching white sheets, my head turned to the side to look at one of them. The tips of his fingers turning pink, the blue and purple veins popping on the back of his hand, imprinting the shape of his bones. His breath warm against my quivering lips, smelling like a mixture of different drinks, the sound of his grunts igniting the desire within me - intensifying as my moans turn from controlled breaths to desperate whines.
Then, Melody's gray eyes staring at the ceiling, the blood clotting in her agape mouth. Her skin a deathly white, the blood that's supposed to give it color spluttering around her limp body. The hair that was once a rich brown matting with the dark of the blood, drying to make of each strand a crisp root. Her room, a place for us to talk and be our real selves, a complete mess of scattered belongings and Melody's real physical form decaying on the floor, as if she's part of her own belongings, a thing without a soul. And the foul smell...
