Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just strongly recommend it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.
Or just read it here (:
ONE
Abnormal Psychology 3, Yale
New Haven, Connecticut
Thursday, August 31, 2006
11:12 AM
A crowd had gathered around the spot Rachel Richardson had fallen, blanketing the bloodstain in the cobblestone walkway and covering it with candles, flowers, and pictures to pay homage to the girl who had apparently jumped to her death. It had only been twelve hours since the event, the news of Rachel's suicide shocking the campus as it spread school-wide in a matter of minutes, with detectives only working a short while to determine whether or not they had a true suicide on their hands or something of formulated murder, though the latter seemed unlikely. Overnight, the place had been taped off, photographed, and searched for evidence, with none of the police coming up with anything out of the ordinary before they allowed students to set up their vigil.
However, the remembrance was only a small part of how stunned the students of Yale University were. As the story of the girl who had found her, Riley Hill, spread throughout classrooms and dorms, the tale had made its own twists and turns, but remaining mostly true to its original form: Riley had been walking back to her suite after having dinner with her boyfriend, thinking about everything else except for where she was going in the dark. While she walked, her head had been in the clouds before it was ripped back down to reality the moment she stepped into a puddle of thick liquid. Looking at the ground, she saw the broken, bloody body of Rachel Richardson, a girl she had barely known but had once shared a class with. From there, she had called the cops, who had taken her down to the station for questioning. By the time she returned the next morning, her roommates had been able to piece together the story from the murmurs Riley let slip, spreading the tale around campus for those who were interested.
As the account wound its way through ears and mouths, classes and registration were still due to proceed. "Shopping week" continued, ID cards were still being handed out, and sororities were still being rushed. Although what had happened to Rachel had been tragic, life still moved on, with the girl's fellow students passing the place she had hit the pavement and stopping by to show their respects between classes. Ultimately, though, the shock would undoubtedly die off, soon to be replaced with curiosity and questions. Why did she jump? Why was no one there to stop her? How come she didn't leave behind a note?
In a classroom across campus, all of those questions ran through Amy Winchester's mind as she sat in the back of the abnormal psychology class she was auditing. While the professor continued on about the id, the ego, and the superego and how that reflected in what they would be doing during the semester should any of the thirty students that packed the small auditorium choose to take his class, Amy felt herself checking out as she barely listened, keeping her pen poised over the notebook in front of her to make it look as though she was busy working rather than thinking. Around her, she could tell the same was true of the other students, especially the ones with red eyes and puffy cheeks. No one in Professor Gray's class was paying attention, causing her to wonder whether the man was aware of it or choosing to press on in order to try to keep some sort of stability around campus.
Amy hadn't known Rachel Richardson all that well, only coming into contact with her once or twice over the years due to the fact that she was a friend of a friend. They had never hung out, never really talked, nor never really said much to one another aside from the occasional hello. Unfortunately, with a death on campus, she couldn't help but both feel sorry for the girl who had jumped and a little afraid. Ever since her summer with her biological father, John Winchester, Amy had been on edge, becoming the epitome of paranoid the more time she spent away from the man.
At the end of the spring semester the year before, Amy had flown home from Yale, ready to soak up the sun and finish a long list of books she had been compiling during the school year. She had arrived fresh from New Haven relaxed and proud of the final grade she had received on her drama exam, and also in a hurry to get to the charity gala her adopted parents, Joel and Jennifer Forester, were hosting at the North Shore Hotel. Making a rush to get there to help set up, Amy hadn't done much aside from offer moral support as she sat on the stage, listening to Jennifer scold the hired help and watch as the men doing the heavy lifting tried to appease the woman by setting everything down exactly to her requirements. While she sat idly by, kicking her feet against the floor, Amy had mentally been making plans over what to do during her vacation, staring first and foremost with getting a haircut.
Unfortunately, before anything could be put into motion, and even before the gala could begin, her summer had been interrupted by John Winchester's presence. Though she didn't know the man standing in the hallway, demanding that Joel Forester let his adopted daughter leave to head off to some undisclosed location with a stranger, was her biological father, Amy had felt a familiarity with him. As soon as the basics were explained to her, that John was there to whisk her away for awhile and promised to return before the end of August, the feeling of acquaintance had suddenly clicked. However, that was about the only thing between John and Amy Winchester that had connected.
During the trip, which had started as silently as it remained, Amy had sat in the passenger's seat of the man's hulking, intimidating truck, which seemed to match the build of the man behind the wheel, letting him take control of whatever they were doing. Ultimately, though, after a brief stop in Chicago, she had quickly realized that whatever journey they were about to embark on wasn't likely to be of the normal variety. John had returned to the diner he had dropped her off in—a preview of things to come, though she hadn't known it at the time—about as beaten and bloody as Amy had heard Rachel's dead body had been. After a few minutes of standing still, giving her every opportunity to ask the man what they were doing and where they were going, they had started back on the road, heading toward Minneapolis, Minnesota with Amy's mouth snapped shut for fear of overstepping her bounds.
Once in Minneapolis, John had done what he was about to do many times over and disappeared for weeks at a time, leaving Amy alone in a dodgy motel room somewhere off the Interstate and far from civilization. With only a television, a stack of books she had brought from home, and the occasional visit to the restaurant sharing the lodge's lot for company, she had soon grown bored of being trapped in a room sealed off with some kind of white powder on the ground for protection. Giving up on staying under lock and key, despite the fact that she was initially hesitant to even move a curtain back to peak outside for fear of disrupting the line of granules in the sill, Amy had headed for the diner perched near the road, getting a job as a waitress for something to do until John Winchester returned. However, before she could become comfortable in the position, the man had shown up to drag her elsewhere, causing her to leave behind the job to hurry off to another city.
But as soon as they reached Louisville, Kentucky, everything had been different. Without asking, John had begun to fill her in on his mission—his case for the FBI, or so she thought. Telling her that he was trailing two armed-and-dangerous men that needed to be watched, he informed her that he needed her eyes and ears planted inside the restaurant near where the pair of men were staying in town, giving her a chance to pick up where she left off with her job in Minneapolis. Ultimately, though, the task had been more than she could handle, giving her a few panic attacks along the way as she tried to hold her own while the men talked to her, becoming almost certain that they would just know what she was up to with John and that he had asked her to watch them from a safe distance. Thankfully, she and John had left town before she could encounter the pair more than once, giving her time to calm down and sleep on it on the way to Green River, Arkansas. Unthankfully, it was there that the man decided to switch up Amy's routine, asking her to go undercover to find out what his targets were up to.
Assuming the role, she had pretended to be both an Australian university student traveling with her father, her most truthful disguise, and a police officer working on a murder case the two men seemed interested in learning about. Unfortunately, after a flash of a similar FBI badge that looked identical to the one she had found in John's bedroom, and after the older of the pair, who Amy had learned was named Dean, had begun to look as though he recognized her underneath the blonde wig, fake glasses, and color contacts she wore to disguise herself, Amy had gotten skittish. Freaking out, she had left Green River with John, barely giving him any information that could be deemed useful as to what the men had been doing in Arkansas.
Following him to Nebraska, where they had spent about two hours in town doing nothing, before heading to Maine for the rest of the summer, Amy had determined a possible catalyst in Dean's recollection of her. The crucifix she wore around her neck, a piece of jewelry she had gotten for her thirteenth birthday that had been the only thing she had had of her real parents for years, had been somewhat of a neon sign. The small cross, made of silver with inlaid diamonds, was generic enough but also unique to her. She doubted, in all the towns across the nation that Dean and his partner had undoubtedly been to, that he had seen someone with the same trinket. Taking it off directly after stumbling into just the partner—neglecting to do so beforehand, thinking the pair weren't staying anywhere near Brewer, Maine—Amy had kept it in her pocket to have it close to her. The thing, which hadn't been removed in the almost-eight years since she had gotten it, had been as much a part of her as her lungs or her ribs, and not having it on her would be similar to removing a vital organ.
Unfortunately, it wasn't long before her and the necklace were soon parted. After the last encounter with Dean and his partner in the parking lot of the diner in which she worked, Amy had learned the truth about the "armed and dangerous" men John had asked her to watch. As the events of the night unfolded, leading up to the reveal that the pair weren't just John Winchester's targets, but also his sons, Amy had been blinded with some kind of irrational rage, taking off the one thing she had placed next to her heart for years and slamming it on the table near the door of the motel room. In some weird way, she thought it was supposed to symbolize her lack of want in joining the family that seemed to be playing some sort of spy-versus-spy with one another, as though removing the piece of jewelry she had been told had been her mother's was a sign to John that she was leaving them to go about their business without her. Ultimately, though, as soon as she arrived home from splitting on her own from the man, she regretted the action, wanting the thing back as she sat in the center of some kind of Mexican standoff going on between her adoptive family.
From the moment she walked through the door, everything inside the Forester home had been silent, with doors to every room closed as though everyone had decided to go their separate ways for the summer. Her twin brothers, Thomas and Tristan, were split up and across the house from one another, with Jennifer in the movie lounge and Joel in his study, leaving Amy to wander between them as she tried to figure out what had happened while she was gone. However, she had never gotten an answer, even after she had flown from Chicago O'Hare to Tweed Regional Airport in New Haven and spent the first day after landing being helped by Joel as he carried her boxes and furniture up the stairs to her fifth-floor dorm. When she was settled, he had left almost immediately, checking the car for anything possibly left behind before taking off in a hurry. Fortunately for her, Amy hadn't spent much time dwelling on the oddness of the situation, instead focusing on her new roommate.
The girl had been a tall blonde named Sarah, thankfully much unlike her co-worker of the same name from the Perko's Café in Brewer. With brown, doe-eyes and a big smile, Amy had pegged the girl as friendly from the get-go, deciding to make each other more comfortable by spending Tuesday night indoors with The Exorcism of Emily Rose playing loudly on the surround sound of a recreational area nestled in a hidden corner of the building's first floor that was soundproofed to be used for loud noises after a certain hour. As they squirmed, laughed, and tried to distract themselves from the grotesqueness onscreen, the two had made fast friends, even deciding to test out a few classes together on the first day of "shopping week" the following morning. However, the two had gone separate ways for the second half of the first day of school, with Sarah heading to Matt Keiser's party and leaving Amy alone to read in the common room of their two-bedroom, two-person suite housed in the added-on Swing Dorms—a residence hall Amy had been glad to be placed in. While she had been used to sharing a place closer to campus with four people—two in each of the spacious, antique rooms sitting inside apartment-like accommodations—she was thankful to have been put in the extra housing sitting far from classes. Though that meant a further walk to everything, it also meant she only had to share the bathroom, television, and Internet signal with only one other person—which, in all honesty, was worth it.
The only downside she could find to having been placed so far from everyone else was the fact that her new friend from back home in Northbrook, Illinois had been hired as the resident advisor for Vanderbilt Hall on the opposite corner of the school. Bailey Yost, who had appeared on Amy's doorstep near the end of summer carrying a plate of cookies and a new-neighbor hello, had become a good acquaintance in the time that they had known each other. Also blonde, Bailey's five-foot-two stature had spent most of the first couple of days back at school scolding freshman for making too much noise or trying to sneak beer into their rooms. However, being the RA for the rowdiest bunch of students on campus also meant that she heard most of the gossip, up to and including what had happened with Rachel Richardson. As soon as she had heard it, Bailey had passed along the message about the girl, giving infinitely less details in the text Amy had received as she did during breakfast earlier in the morning. As she, Amy, and Sarah sat at a table near the middle of one of the school's many dining halls, Bailey continued on about how the girl was found and whether or not it was a suspected suicide. Since then, Amy had become just as bothered about the death as half the campus seemed to be, floating from class-to-class with her mind only partially in it.
Ultimately, though, the cause of her being so troubled by the suicide, aside from the obvious, was a mystery to her. She hadn't known the girl, so why was she so concerned over the way she had died? For some unexplained reason, something in her gut squirmed whenever she thought of it, reminding her of a sensation she had felt during the summer when she had been in the Perko's Café. Her stomach had twisted and slithered as though a snake had found its way into her intestines, passing a few moments later and never returning. The more she thought about Rachel Richardson, the more she was reminded of that feeling, her stomach flopping as she remembered hearing about Riley Hill stepping in the girl's blood and stumbling upon the dead body. While that could easily be explained as nausea just from the imagery alone, Amy couldn't help but sense that this was something more.
Kicking the thought away as the rest of the class began to pack up, Amy shut her notebook and shoved it into her bag, nodding to Sarah beside her as the two stood up. On her roommate's face was a look mirroring everyone else's as they headed out of the lecture hall, one that said this class hadn't been as interesting as it had been billed. Making a mental note to cross it off the list when she arrived at her next subject, Theatre History, Amy trailed behind Sarah, straightening up next to her once they were out in the throng of the corridor. For the first few days of the semester, everything seemed to be back in high school, with lessons being released at the same time to make sure that everyone got an equal chance to check out the ones they wanted to get into. As people pushed past each other to get into a room across the hall or fish swam upstream to get inside the wide, stone-walled buildings, Amy was reminded of St. Mary's in Northbrook and how crowded things would get in between classes.
Thankfully, before she could dwell on it, Amy found herself out in the courtyard beside Sarah, the two hitching up their book bags from where they had been dislodged in the mob. The air was crisp and clear for a summer day, with some people sweating as they attempted to make their way from Old Campus to their lessons clear across the school in time. Strolling slowly, Amy wrapped her hair around her finger in thought while Sarah directed them to the place they would be splitting, outside of the mathematics building.
"So, you going to that remembrance ceremony at the University Church later?" Sarah asked as they walked, tying her hair up in a ponytail absently. Furrowing her brow in confusion, especially since she hadn't heard anything about a ceremony, Amy glanced down at Sarah, her slightly-shorter gaze matching the bewilderment. "I mean, it's just that you look so bothered by it, I thought you might be going."
Frowning, Amy considered it for a minute as they slowed to a stop beside the opening of the corridor Sarah was soon to head down. "I don't think so. I didn't really know her. I had friends who did, but that's about it."
"Oh," Sarah shrugged. "Anyway, see you later."
Grinning in response, Amy watched as her roommate turned to head down the hallway, disappearing into one of the classrooms, before turning to make her way toward the drama department. It was true, she did have friends who had known Rachel, but Amy had yet to see either Taylor Rosen or Celia Brown since getting to New Haven. In fact, she hadn't even thought about calling them, too shocked over the news of someone throwing themselves out the window to remember. Making a mental note to see how they were once her ten minutes of Theatre History were over, Amy picked up her pace to cross the grassy green grounds, hoping that she wasn't going to be late and forced to stand in the back.
