A/N: A seriously creepy, tripped out story I had to write for my English teacher last year. I'm pretty sure this was the darkest one in the class. Alternately titled 'Second Attempt'. It makes more sense if you've actually read TSB.

Peter shrugged off his coat into his father's hands. His mother looked at him worriedly as he started climbing the stairs.

"Sweetie, where are you going?" she asked, anxious mother that she had become.

"Up," Peter mumbled, pointing in the general direction of his room. Then he continued stumbling upstairs and collapsed onto his bed. He then promptly fell asleep.

Sometime later, he woke with a gasp. He blinked several times and looked around to orient himself. Then he rolled over and moaned into his pillow, "Only a dream. A dream..." He rolled back over. "Stupid dream." Then he rolled of the bed and landed with a thump. Peter dragged himself off the floor and down the stairs. A note from his mother told him where his parents were; shopping, of course, just like they had done every Saturday night since before he was born. The note also stated what time they would be back: around 7:30 pm, half an hour from the current time. Peter snorted. Apparently the therapist had told his parents that they could leave him by himself again, even if it had only been a week since his last suicide attempt. Peter headed back upstairs, tripping more than half the time.

Peter then fell into his dark bedroom, having stepped into and on a pair of shoes tied together in the doorway. He finally found the light switch, and immediately fell again. Gritting his teeth with annoyance, Peter clawed his way to the chair next to the window. It sat directly across from his mirror.

Peter studied his reflection. It seemed that he looked as bad as he felt. He looked like a corpse. Not a particularly new one, either. Peter wondered how Cole looked right now. Thinking of Cole Matthews made him angry and scared. Everybody had asked what had happened, what had provoked Cole, but Peter wouldn't tell. He was still scared Cole would find a way to get even.

"FINE! "He yelled at the mirror, "YOU WANNA KNOW? I'LL TELL YOU!"

"It started with Cole's bragging. Cole's a bully. That's all there is to it. He'll pick on me just 'cause he's bored. He's a show-off too. I was with my friends when he walked up, pushed me into the bushes, and started telling the people nearest to him about how he broke into a hardware store last week.

It's kind of an unspoken rule. If somebody tells you something, you don't tell, no matter what. But at the time, I couldn't care less. Cole was going to pay at long last. Of course, I hadn't considered it was Cole I was talking about.

A few days later, he struts up to me in the hallways and shoves me against the wall. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, since it's practically routine, but then he holds me against the wall and says to me "You're a dead man." Then he laughs-laughs- and goes off like he owns the place, in search of another victim." Peter paused, taking a deep breath. He struggled to begin again. "I spent the rest of the day jumping. He didn't show up at all. I had reached the edge of the parking lot, had made the mistake of thinking I was safe-" here Peter laughed, then coughed several times "when Cole came up and spun me around. Then he punched me. Again and again. In the face. I tried to run away, but-" Peter's face darkened, and he lay down on the bed. His throat was sore. Starting for a third time was even harder. He croaked a few times, coughed, and found his voice. "But I tripped. I think it was the curb. I don't remember. I had a big bruise from whatever it was for a while. By then I was too disoriented to tell anyway. Cole began slamming my head against the sidewalk. My nose had already been bleeding, and now my head was, too. My friends told that I started crying, begging him to stop. They also told me it took six students to pull him off me. The one thing they didn't have to tell me about was that Cole was laughing." Peter got up and started pacing slowly. "That's it, I guess. All that happened. But what's funny is, Cole was right. I am a dead man. A moving, talking, breathing person, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm dead. Maybe I should have died. I still should die. Nobody really cares about me. I'm just a burden to everyone."

If it had been in a cartoon, Peter's head would've had a light bulb over it. He checked the clock. He only had a few minutes to do what he had to before his parents came home. Peter made his way downstairs, into the kitchen. He carefully selected a knife from the drawer, making sure it was a sharp one.

Peter held up the knife, looking at it with a sad, stupid smile. This time, he really would kill himself.

TaDa! Creepy, yes? My mom found this on the stairs before I turned it in and flipped 'cause she though I was gonna kill myself.

I was like 'Erm...Mom...I kinda like living. That way I can get books from the library and eat Fudgsicles and do other crap you can't do when you're dead.'