Summary:

"Sometimes, being afraid changes us. For better or worse, we never know." Ghosts have a habit of surrounding me, warning those who cannot see the darkness to stay away. You obviously didn't listen. And for that I thank you for showing me; that even I can have happiness. The Girl-Next-Door, that's all Samantha Starr was. A couple of months had passed before being happy turned into something else. Love.

Prologue

When I was young, I always thought that mum and dad would live forever and we'd be one happy family. I was wrong. The year I entered high school was the same year I started feeling tired all the time. It was a tired beyond tired, the kind of exhaustion that makes your entire body ache. I assumed it was the standard summer-to-fall adjustment process: I'd started high school; I was waking up early after a summer of sleeping in; I was staying up late to finish my homework. Words thrown at me regarding my body, I didn't pay any heed.

But as the months wore on and my body adjusted to the changes, the exhaustion seemed to linger elsewhere—in my heart, in my head. I just felt off, as if someone had come along and dimmed the lights a bit. I started to drag, to sense something dark floating around the tiny file cabinets that I'd always imagined lined the inside of my brain. But whenever anyone else seemed to notice the dark thing—a parent, a friend, whoever—I'd always give them the same explanation: "I'm fine. I'm just really tired." Deep down I knew it was more than that, but part of me believed that if I covered it up well enough, it would eventually go away.

It didn't.

It is a relentless ghost; no matter how many times I try to be rid of it, it finds a way to make a comeback. I never asked for help. I hid my rituals from everyone, I'd spend hours at night reciting special sayings over and over until I got them right, for fear that if I didn't, terrible things would happen. After about a year of tapping my foot and biting my lip and writing and rewriting my homework 10 times, I finally realized that terrible things happen anyway; my dog died, my perfect grades slipped, my parents died, and I was miserable all the time. I forced myself to stop counting. I thought I finally had my brain under control.

But the ghost, as ever, returned. It is a constant presence in my life. Sometimes it shows up as anxiety, and sometimes it shows up as depression. It consumes me. In high school, it showed up as both. It was brutal and relentless and never lifted and I swore I could fix it by myself, which I couldn't. I was sent to my Uncle Aaron in Beacon Hills, the only family that still kept contact with my parents (that I know of).

I barely remember Uncle Aaron or mum and dad now, their faces seem to be blurry and dark in my mind; it's almost that I am cruel to forget them. My family. Photos seem to remind me how much of a stranger I have become. I started skipping school, unable to battle the never-ending thoughts. What would have happened if I didn't get better? What if I start to just not care? What if I stop caring about whether I live or die? They never stopped, they haunted my sleep, my thoughts, my dreams. It never seemed to stop.

A silver car's front end crumpled with the force of impact thrusting two-foot of metal back into another car. The windshield exploded, showering with silvers of glass. Both of the driving wheel and the dashboard compacted into one humongous mess. The rear passenger side door was savagely torn apart from its hinges. The car shuddered to a stop once then fell slowly onto its side.

The driver and passenger: a man and a woman were killed instantly upon impact. The salty metallic smell lingered in the air, the screams from the back seat of the silver car. The screams were high and feminine, possibly a young female. The young teenaged girl shrieked in fright as something wet dripped down her face and her legs couldn't move, pinned down by her father's seat.

She was no more than fourteenyears old with flaming red hair and silvery grey eyes. Olive, soft delicate looking skin wearing a now blood drenched yellow sun dress.

The girl whimpers, quite dazed from the crash. "Mummy? Daddy?"

Suddenly, the girl stopped whimpering but she panted, eyes closed. A gentle wind drifting along the highway became sharp and the silvers of glass flew into the girl's face but she doesn't move or even shriek as a silver streaked across her left cheek, fresh red blood soaking down her already blood-stained face.

Then darkness.

It stayed the same, the relentless haunting of their deaths; it was like time had repeated. They haunted me. Now three years had passed until I was able to be released from my white, sterile, cold cage. No bars but a never-ending nothing of white; it was sickening.

I wasn't sick, I wasn't traumatised.

I was just alone.

Alone in a big dark, frightening world.