“You’re a monster, Ariana,” she whispered as she took her last few breaths. I could feel another disgusting smile creep onto my face and I turned away without saying anything to her. I closed the window and never looked back. The sick part was that I had set everything to look like she had done this to herself. I was a killer.
~
Much like a dream, I was seeing bits and pieces of “her” life after Alex’s show. I saw myself answering the phone and talking to Alex’s mother. I saw myself pretending to be upset after seeing her body. I saw her mother handing me the blood splattered journal. The funeral. The slap from her mom. The phone call from Eli.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting with a boy on a hill, close to where Ethan’s car had been pulled from the river. Judging from his eyes, I knew instantly that this was “Her Ethan”. Eli stared out into the sky. He remained silent but I was fidgeting. He sighed and I could feel the irritation growing within me.
“So why are we here?” I finally said.
“Don’t be mad, Ariana, please. Just give me a second. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. You’re all I have left.”
“Oh, baby, that is hilarious,” I laughed venomously. “You have no one. You’re a repulsive dog and you deserve worse than being alone.”
“Ariana, I’m sorry, okay? I have always loved you. I’m so lost.”
“Oh bullshit! You basically killed your own child! Why am I even here?”
“I miss you! I didn’t know where else to turn. Ryan won’t answer my phone calls,” he said in a whinny voice.
“Oh boo fucking hoo, Eli! Stop bitching to me about your petty crap! You cheated on me, beat Alex, and betrayed Ryan. All I can think about is killing you for being the worthless scumbag you are.”
“Damn, Ariana, is me cheating on you really worth so much hatred? Alex is dead and so is our child. Please, don’t make me suffer anymore than I already do every day!”
“Oh barf,” I said pretending to gag. “You do not feel bad. Alex is no loss to either of us. And we both know you didn’t want that baby! You didn’t even show up to her funeral you miserable shit!”
“I wasn’t allowed to go! Her mother asked me not to. I wanted to be there!”
The irritation inside was building up to near combustion. I knew all too well that I was about to lose it. I begged inside my head that I would calm down. The anger just built faster and faster and I reached down for my water. Eli grabbed snatched it from my hand, which he had done many times while we dated and knew I hated it, and began guzzling it. I felt a spark of anticipation and excitement which I didn’t understand yet.
“Gross, Ariana, how long was that sitting in your car? It tastes nasty!”
“That’s because it’s drugged you dumbass.”
He stared at me in shock and then began to laugh. “Funny joke!”
I began to laugh with him. “No joke! I’m planning on cutting you into pieces as soon as you pass out.” I smiled evilly at him and laughed harder.
He laughed for a minute with me and when I started to slow down and my face became a little too serious, he inelegantly stopped chuckling. Consternation quickly registered on his face and I began counting down the minutes before he was unconscious. I could see the dire need for him to run but the drug was slowly pulsing through his body. I watched helplessly as Eli struggled away from me.
My body never moved though and my eyes stayed on him, watching him like a wounded animal, waiting patiently for him to fall. A sickening amount of pleasure ran through me, anticipating the next unknowing victim in front of me. There was near a mile of woods between us and the car. I knew, even without knowing exactly what was going on, that he wasn’t going to make it away.
Eli lost steam quickly, going from a steady run to an exhausting crawl. His inevitable fate was looming in front of him. His arms shook as he pulled himself forward but fighting the effects of the drug was pointless. He was going to die.
I watched in a state of hysteria as my darkest fear was realized. If these truly were memories into a life I didn’t know, a life I chose to block out, I was a closet psychopath. I suddenly thought about whether or not I had ever been caught for these crimes, or if they only suspected I was the culprit. Either way I had experienced the physical lockdown with Ms. Kaitz. Reality or not, I was already in a form of imprisonment.
My body was filled with rage and no remorse. I went running toward Eli in an excited madness. He was still trying to get away with little avail. I watched myself pull out a butcher’s knife and then hacking him apart while he was still alive. The obscene picture in front of me weighed heavily on my soul. I stared unwillingly into his beautiful blue eyes as he just barely made out a sound: eyes that I had gazed lovingly into so many times before this moment.
My soul ached as I watched myself scatter his pieces around the woods and move the bloody leaves around to make it harder to see everything. I wanted to cry when I witnessed my own arms pushing his car into the river. I was absolutely mortified when I realized I was coated in his blood from head to toe. The red liquid made my clothes cling to my body. My hair dangled in strings down my face, blazing in a red hue. The hot stickiness made me claustrophobic and uneasy.
As the anxiety rose, I began to feel the familiar pull of disorientation. I was then instantly thrown into another situation and recognized this boy without a second thought. I knew this boy easily. Ryan looked almost identical to Ryder. His hair was a little darker, nose was a little wider, lips were a little thinner, body a little broader; But I saw Ryder in this boy and his hazel eyes gazed into my soul.
Chapter 20
Ryan stared questioningly at my soaked clothes and the varying splotches of brown that lingered on my jeans.
“What happened to you,” he asked confused.
“I had a long day,” I said back.
“Clearly! You’re soaked and you have dirt or something all over your clothes.” He stared at me waiting for an explanation but nothing came out of my mouth. “Did you walk here?”
“Um, yeah, about that. Eli and I got into a dispute of sorts. I’ve been walking around for a few hours now.”
“Jesus, are you okay? Did he hurt you?” he asked, gripping my shoulders tightly.
“I’m fine. He never had a chance,” I said as gratification radiated through this body. I couldn’t bear to claim these emotions as my own.
“What happened, Ariana?” he asked suspiciously. “You had no reason to even see him! I have been ignoring him for weeks!”
“Don’t worry, I took care of it,” I beamed. The grin on my face was harsh and unsubtle.
Worry instantly presented on his face. “Oh, no, what did you do?” I smiled at him deviously. Suddenly there was a loud knock on his door. “Ariana, go to my room and don’t come out. We will talk about this in a minute. I don’t need anyone seeing you like this.”
I walked slowly to his room hoping that I would hear who was at the door. “Officer” was all I needed to catch to cringe. My other half remained calm and collected. Ariana wasn’t scared at all. After what seemed like a ruthless eternity, Ryan came through the bedroom door looking rather bitter. His face was pale and chalky. His eyes were glazed over in shock. He sat down next to me but our eyes never met.
“So, what was a cop doing at your house?”
“I think you already know why Ariana,” he said emotionless. “I have a feeling you know more than anyone does why he was here.”
“Are you accusing me of something?” I said rancorously. The feeling of rage and my flaring temper were becoming exceedingly apparent. I was suddenly panic- stricken for his life.
“We both know that I am,” he said faintly as he glanced down at my clothes. “I’m going to assume that isn’t dirt all over you either.”
“You might say that,” I said coldly.
“Did you, you know?”
“What, kill him? You might say that too.”
“Holy shit, Ariana, what were you thinking? I thought you
were getting help from Ms. Kaitz! I thought you said the delusions were getting better!”
“I say a lot of things, Ryan,” I said frankly. “There’s no reason to worry though. They’ll never find his body. The animals will get rid of the pieces before the end of the day.”
“Ariana, you need to turn yourself in!”
“Why? It’s not like he’ll be missed on this God forsaken planet. If anything, I just did women everywhere a favor.”
“I’m calling Ms. Kaitz. She’ll know what to do,” he said in a panic.
As he walked away, I felt the anger boiling over. When my eyes fell on the large glass paper weight, I froze inside of myself. As my hand reached for the shimmering ball, I begged for this nightmare to stop. He never even saw his inevitable fate coming but the sickening crack of the globe crashing against his head told me that he was dead. I quickly went over to him and for the first time since I had been living this nightmare in this foreign body, I felt an unmistakable guilt. I hadn’t meant to kill him.
I sat down by him and carefully flipped him over to see his beautiful hazel eyes staring lifelessly back at me. They were the same hazel eyes I had seen in my dream and the same hazel that I had grown to depend on. My very soul broke at the sight of him and I could feel the same radiating through this body. Even as the cold and heartless Ariana, I had regretted his death. Not only that but it had truly been the breaking point for me in this life.
I could feel the sanity deteriorating inside of my head like a thread coming unwound. Second by second the threads were pulling apart and the tightness of my chest bound more rapidly. The nausea rolled through my body as I looked deeper into the glazed eyes that no longer held his soul inside.
I stood up abruptly and grabbed his arm. I pulled him up into my own arms and began to carry him. The dead weight was unbearable and my muscles strained to even move him the few feet to his bed. His blood slowly leaked down his head and onto my hand. Like a tidal wave, the emotion of remorse hit me at full impact. The tears instantly hit my eyes and my legs gave out underneath me. I lay with his body, sobbing uncontrollably, pulling him closer to my face. I softly kissed his forehead and hugged him closer. “What have I done?” I whispered in silence to myself.
I sat like that for only a few minutes, mourning the death of a boy I had grown to love. But the remorse I felt in this body was short lived and I quickly moved into clean up mode. I set him carefully on his bed and touched his face gently, trying so hard to commit every feature of his face to memory. My other half didn’t ever want to forget those hazel eyes and honestly, neither did I.
There was no doubt in my mind that no one would find him laying there in his bed. It would lead to an investigation of murder and I would become a guilty suspect for not one, but two people’s deaths for sure. I began to shuffle around his room looking for some sort of idea to take care of what I had done. When I saw the matches, I knew exactly how the fire had started that had killed Ryder. I had been living my life in an alternate reality to banish these memories and change them into something else.
The problem began when the memories started surfacing. The warning signs were all very apparent now that I knew what I did and I was actually confronting this. Things like the dream, the strange black outs that lead me to Ms. Kaitz, and the unusual spurts of anger that were unlike my personality in every way. None of these things were normal for me. They had simply been a warning from a part of my mind I hadn’t even been aware of. The dream had been the very beginning to my true self awareness.
I watched in the background of my own mind as Ryan’s room slowly began to burn. The fire spread quickly and I watched the flames engulf his body. I was beginning to wonder why I was still standing there because the heat was becoming too much to handle and my lungs were filling with suffocating smoke. Suddenly, I was on the move again and I ran quickly out of the room to the backdoor. The smoke detectors were ringing in my ears and I felt the haze as I busted out of the backdoor to my escape.
~
When my eyes began to focus again, I was speaking with the officer. I was very calm for a teenage girl that had just violently killed two people in the same day. I played the concerned ex-girlfriend very well and no one had suspected that I hadn’t been lying in my bed all day.
I knew all too well what was coming next. I experienced my suicide attempt for the second time, felt the same excruciating pain, and heard all of the same things. The difference was that Ms. Kaitz came crashing into my bedroom with my mother and she was in a panic as she analyzed my wounds. I could feel the blood pooled around my hands. My muscles were almost unresponsive and my body was shutting down quickly.
When Brooke ran into my room, I was astounded. She was the only person that remained exactly the same in both of my lives. The look on her face was a painful reminder of what I had done to her. Of everyone, she was the only person my mind couldn’t bear to change or forget.
From there, I went back into the black hole of nothing and waited for something, anything really, to happen. When I began having short glimpses of the white room I called my prison, I realized that I had never fully been Ariana after the attempted suicide. I had been lost for years inside of my own head as a made up girl. The problem was, my memories of this life I desperately wanted to forget, always resurfaced, deeming me unable to ever live the fantasy I begged to be real.
~
The darkness came back only for a short time and when I finally came to, I was chained down again. I understood now why they kept me detained. Every time I would lose the control of my fantasy life, I would take it out on the staff. The girl I knew myself to be was the first personality my other self had come up with that was tame enough to listen before losing control. I was the only one that could be reasoned with.
Not only had I abused the employees several times, but I had tried to escape. Though the people I loved had never suspected anything but insanity, the police had mentioned foul play on my part. Many were convinced that my state was merely an act to get out punishment for what I had done. The running only heightened that suspicion. This was unmistakably laughable to me because any sane person should realize that this place was no better than prison.
On the police’s end, Alex had remained a “suicide”, while Eli and Ryan’s deaths had not. I had been a little more crazed and way too sloppy about both of them. I had been seen with Eli right before I had killed him. I had also been seen walking into Ryan’s house right before it went up in flames. Regardless of the undeniable suspicious behavior and evidence leading toward me, there was nothing they could actually do with me when I wasn’t “here”.
Ms. Kaitz had been trying for years to get inside of my zone of trust but never got very far with me. After several severe regressions to my “beginning”, she got tired and burned out. The failure was stressful for everyone. She wanted so badly to reach me but when she got too close, the wall went back up. She had never gotten this far. She never even got close to here.
I waited for someone to come but I remained alone. I drifted in and out of sleep. When I heard footsteps next to me, my eyes shot open. Ms. Kaitz stared at me in shock and stayed silent. She had said she didn’t think I would ever wake up again.
“Patricia,” I greeted her.
“You came back,” she said smiling.
“Trust me, not by choice.”
“It never has been, has it?” she asked, instantly in therapist mode.
“Don’t psychoanalyze me right now, doc,” I said lucidly.
“Ariana?”
“”Sort of.”
“How did this happen?” she asked shocked.
“In death,” I answered irritated.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Everyone died. I should also be in the afterlife, whatever that may be, but you kind of ruined that for me,” I said glaring at her.
She gasped, “Explain more! Please!”
“I still feel like I’m Aidriana but I have all of the other memories to
o. Memories of a childhood I never experienced and of things I never did. I’ve seen everything from the life I don’t know and I still don’t feel like it is mine.” I let out a long sigh and felt so lost. “I also saw my near death experience. So thank you for the barging in,” I said sarcastically.
“What else did you see?” she asked cautiously.
“A lot of death,” I whispered. I shivered in disgust but a small flicker of ecstasy was hidden inside.
“Since you are somewhat yourself now, you realize that I’m going to have to report this, correct?”
“And?”
“Ariana, the police have waited nearly six years to hear your side of this story,” she emphasized. “What exactly happened with Eli?”
“What do you mean? They told me that he went missing,” I said, pretending to be confused.
“He did! They never found his body, Ariana! People saw you two together the day of his disappearance. People saw you near the river where his car was found.”
“What?” I asked in shock. I had never known people had seen us that close to the place I killed him at. I truly was worried now.
She looked at me for a moment and her eyes widened for the briefest moment. “You were never with him that day?”
“No,” I lied. Worse, she knew it. She must’ve seen it in my eyes, where a personality that had never existed before was in charge, a personality that felt remorse for what had happened, my personality. Anger grew at my core and I felt like I was losing myself. She looked at me sadly, knowing that I was hiding something. “I want to see my family.”
“Ariana, that probably isn’t the best idea. Not yet anyways.”
“Do not; tell me what is best for me! I want to see them! I can’t promise I won’t disappear again and I haven’t been all here in quite a long time. I need to see them!”
“Fine, I will make the arrangements if they allow it,” she agreed. Caution sauntered on her face as she walked away from me.
Panic was brewing within me and I felt like I was in an epic internal battle with this personality I loathed and wished didn’t exist. I slowly began to feel like I was only partially in control and Ariana was becoming more apparent. “She” was trying to take complete control and “she” was ready to do whatever was necessary to do so.