Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 64910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Or smother me with a pillow.
“What about you, Della?” Lulu asked. “What’s your worst fear?”
“Worst fear? Or worst way to die?” Della asked curiously, sipping on her illegally bought alcoholic drink.
“Either,” Lulu said.
Della shrugged. “I’m terrified of being beaten up and raped while I’m running. I carry mace and a knife with me.”
That was a horrific thought.
But since I didn’t run, that had never occurred to me before.
But, since Della was well on her way to being a superstar runner in track and field, I could see how that would be a scary situation for her.
“I have a fear of losing my boyfriend,” the newest girl to our group, Mimi, said. “Like one day, I’m gonna wake up, and he’s going to be dead.”
I would’ve laughed at the thought, but she was so dead serious that I didn’t.
Not that the thought of losing someone wasn’t scary.
It was.
But the funny thought was me actually having a boyfriend.
Having to get one would be a feat in and of itself with trauma. But having to keep one for any length of time? That would be downright comical.
Hence the laughter in my thoughts.
“Why do you ask what our worst fear is?” I found myself asking instead. “Seems kind of morbid.”
As I asked it, I started to take in the sights around us.
We were at a bar with about a hundred people milling about around us. Some were standing up drinking at high top tables. Some, like us, were filled with younger adults that couldn’t drink yet—as evidenced by the bright neon green wristband we all wore.
“Oh, no reason.” Lulu shrugged. “I guess maybe it was just a thought leftover from my psych class today. Did you know there are…”
That’s when I looked over and saw my brother at the next table over, being deathly quiet and dousing himself in the shadows. I knew I should’ve cut the conversation short with my friends. But I didn’t. And that cost them their lives.
Not that I knew it at the time.
I swallowed hard and tried to look away, but time after time, my gaze would be drawn back to him.
To him, listening to every single instance of our conversation.
Not that I was scared about him listening in to my worst fear.
He knew it well.
He’d been the one to instill that fear inside of me.
My thoughts went back to a few years ago. To when he’d given me that fear.
• • •
Two years ago
I woke to the sound of a shuffling lurch.
One second, I was lying in bed, face up, sleeping.
And the next I had a pillow over my face, and a massive body holding my arms down to my sides and my torso to the bed so I couldn’t move the pillow away.
My first inclination was to scream. Which was comical, because if I screamed, nobody would hear me.
I was living with my brother after all. The one person that could hear me was the one person that was doing the smothering.
I struggled uselessly against the pillow, knowing that this was it.
This was the time that I would die.
Oxygen started to deplete the moment the last of the scream fled from my mouth.
My struggles went from intense and immediate to lethargic from one breath to the next.
My nose hurt.
My eyes were wide open but unseeing.
A hand pressed hard over my mouth from the top of my pillow, and that’s when I realized the truth.
My brother really did kill me.
Except, sometime later, after the last of the fight left my body, I woke up.
It was morning.
There was light shining through the dirty window, and there were dust particles floating around the still air of my room.
I sat up slowly, feeling the ache in my arms and chest.
My throat felt raw, and my face hurt.
I didn’t make the smothering thing up.
But it was like my brother to bring me back to life, just so he could play some psychological game with me.
I took a deep breath, relishing the feel of air in my lungs.
Then looked up to find my brother standing in my doorway, watching.
“You’re going to be late for school,” he chirped.
I felt sick to my stomach as I looked at his expression.
Though he had a smile pasted on his face, the emptiness in his eyes gave him away.
Psychopath.
• • •
I was no longer terrified of suffocation anymore.
I was terrified of something much worse.
My brother.
CHAPTER 2
I’m glad I have boobs. The last thing I need is people making eye contact with me.
-Dory’s secret thoughts
DORY
The first of my friends to die was Lulu.
According to the paper, she’d rear-ended a log truck and had died on impact.
It took me a whole half a second to realize what had happened.
That it hadn’t been a mistake.
That it had been very much planned.
It was while I was composing an anonymous letter to the police, telling them what I thought was going on—i.e., my psychopath brother killing her because he’d heard her worst fear—that I heard about Della.