Anna
Dr. Pabbie drops Kristoff off at the main entrance of Arendelle High.
It took him less than fifteen minutes to get here.
Kristoff races across the sidewalk through the rain, closing in the distance between us.
He reaches where I stand waiting underneath the school's portico, shielding myself from the storm.
He has a gray beanie hat slouching over his messy hair.
"What's going on?" Kristoff asks, out of breath from running. Even gasping for air, I can tell that he's concerned about me.
"I didn't know if you would come." I feel pitiful standing there in my Prom gown, dateless and rejected.
"Of course I'd come."
"You were right... about Hans." A few of the tears escape. I don't bother swatting them away. Kristoff has already seen them.
His bulky arms wrap around me, squeezing me close to him. My head rests against his broad chest.
"I guess he started hanging around Flynn. Everyone knows Flynn is bad news." I murmur into his shirt. "He just stood there and watched as Flynn beat on Jack Overland. He just watched it happen without doing anything. He could've stopped it, but he didn't."
"I know." Kristoff whispers as he runs his fingers through my strawberry blonde hair, which has half-fallen out of that updo I had worked so hard on. "I saw what those two were doing. It's sick. In the end, all they really are is a pair of cowards. They always go running whenever I butt into their fights because I'm bigger than they are."
"You tried to stop them?" I look up into his face, without pushing away from our closeness. His face is inches from mine.
"I succeeded, too." He snorted.
I'm such an idiot for ever choosing Hans over him.
Kristoff didn't walk away without looking back. Kristoff helped those people who needed him.
He would've helped my sister, too.
My sister!
I withdraw from Kristoff's embrace. "I need you to help me find my sister Elsa."
"Elsa's your sister?" His face scrunches up, shocked. "The Snow Queen is your sister?"
Why is everyone finding my family relations to be so surprising all of a sudden? Is it really so mind-blowing that Elsa is my sister? Sheesh.
"Yes." I nod, trying to hide my exasperation. "And she's missing. She won the crown and fled from the stage when she was supposed to give her acceptance speech."
"She won the crown?" Now he's shocked that Elsa beat Rachel Corona from what the entire school thought would undoubtedly be hers.
"Yes, pay attention." The irritation is edging into my voice. "But she disappeared and nobody's seen her since. She might be out here, caught in the storm. She might need my help."
"We'll find her." Kristoff promises.
A roll of thunder snaps us into action.
We search the entirety of Arendelle High's school grounds.
Within the building, we search every room of every class. We go up and down every hall in both the upstairs and downstairs floors.
I search every stall of every bathroom.
We were hoping she had stayed within the safety of the school's walls, but she is nowhere to be found.
We continue our search outside, going right out in the middle of the storm.
We search even through the crackling of the thunder and the flashing of the lightning. We search even through the pouring rain and howling wind.
We search the parking lot and in between every car parked in it. We search the football field and beneath both sides of bleachers.
We search every possible location within the vicinity of the school.
She is still nowhere to be found.
My apprehension is growing.
My anxiety is worsening.
Where are you, Elsa?
"Elsa!" I cup my hands around my mouth and call out over the football field.
I slide down to sit on the bleachers. A puddle of water that had collected on the cool metal soaks into the back of my dress. It's all right because my dress is basically already ruined anyway.
"What do we do now? We've looked everywhere!" I cry.
A different voice answers, "Are you looking for Elsa?" It's not Kristoff; it's Jack Frost.
He walks calmly up the steps of the bleachers to us, his shoes clanging against the metal. "You're her sister, aren't you?"
"Yes, do you know where she is?" I ask, feeling hopeful.
"No."
My hopefulness is crushed.
"Maybe she went home." Kristoff suggests.
"No, that's the last place she'd go." Jack reaches us. "I've looked all over the school grounds for her."
"We have, too."
"I do have a hunch." Jack's crystal blue eyes gaze out over the entirety of the field. "If there's one thing I know about Elsa, it's that she always goes to wherever she can find isolation."
I follow wherever it is he's looking with my own eyes.
There, behind the football field, is a thick blanket of trees.
A vast forest stretches out behind the school.
An ominous roll of thunder does nothing to alleviate my anxiety.
Elsa
Thunder resounds through the forest, vibrating the ground underneath my feet.
I'm caught in a miserable torrential downpour.
I wander mindlessly through the forest behind Arendelle High.
I trip over sticks poking up from the ground, camouflaged by the thickness of the wild grass.
Each step kicks the fallen raindrops back up. The rain clings to my dress, soaking it through. The fabric trailing on the ground behind me has a layer of mud collecting onto it.
My body is shaking violently from the cold.
My arms hold my fragile body as tight as possible.
My teeth chatter and my eyes try to see through the buildup of tears.
The forest is a blur of green leaves and brown bark.
Every turn I make brings me to a place that looks identical to where I had just come from.
I'm going absolutely no where, yet I'm running to anywhere but here.
I'm running from my past. I'm running from the hobgoblins. I'm running from myself.
Lightning cracks, illuminating the dark of the forest for a split second. It's followed by a loud clap of thunder.
I struck my sister.
I struck her with my very own hands.
I can't hold it back anymore.
My sobs echo through the forest, bouncing off of the trees. The sound comes from a dark, shadowy place from deep within me. This place is broken like frozen fractals of glass.
The tears stream down my face, mixing with the rain falling from the sky.
The sobs evolve into screams.
Screaming is the only way I can express this pain, this regret, this remorse.
I had buried it so far within me, but now it has to come out.
My screams mix in with the chorus of the thunder.
The steady flow of tears progress into an erupting volcano of emotion.
I'm like a bottle coming uncorked. I'm like a caged animal being set free. I'm like the Snow Queen letting all of my emotions free in a raging snowstorm displaying my heartache.
But, still I run, because I can't stop.
I know that if I stop running, it will all catch up to me and eat me alive.
I'm not strong enough to handle any of this.
I'm not strong enough.
Dead tree leaves crunch underneath my feet as I dash through the woods.
I jump into a puddle, splattering more water up onto me.
I run without stopping. I run without looking back.
I might've won Prom Queen, but my only kingdom is this kingdom of isolation.
The trees are my only subjects.
They bend ever so slightly by the blasting air swirling around.
The branches groan under the weight of the wind rustling through them.
One branch gets knocked down, nearly hitting me in the head. It drops to the ground behind me. I don't look back at it. I keep running.
The lightning flashes again, but this time all I see are headlights.
I was in the backseat of the car.
My dad was driving and my mom was sitting on the passenger's side.
The unrelenting snow was swirling around on the road, but my dad kept driving.
The storm was obscuring his view through the windshield.
I could almost see those icy fingers reaching out toward me.
"I'm not the Snow Queen!" I screamed.
Ever since Junior High, I endured never-ending bullying, which only became worse after I struck my sister in 8th grade.
Rumors went around saying that I'd struck her with my ice powers.
After the first rumors made their rounds, many more followed. Each became even more horrifying than the ones preceding it.
The rumors followed me into high school, even into my Junior year.
The kids that didn't bully me were genuinely afraid of me. I saw the terror in their eyes as they scurried past me as fast as they could.
I was a monster.
I grew to be afraid of myself. I grew to hate myself.
I hid away in my room whenever I wasn't at school.
I tried to conceal it. I tried not to feel it.
That's what my daddy and the therapists always told me to do.
I had to keep myself under control because if I didn't, someone would get hurt.
I was diagnosed with depression. Severe depression.
The kids diagnosed me as having ice powers.
When you hear people tell you that you have supernatural powers for so long, something weird happens inside of you.
You almost start to believe it.
Sure, you might still deny it.
But something in the back of your mind starts whispering to you that maybe they were right all along...
My parents were taking me to my therapy appointment. We weren't planning on having one today, but my parents scheduled it last minute.
I always would completely lose it whenever the winter brought a vicious snowstorm to rage it's evil upon us.
I always lost it because I knew what it would be like when I went to school the next day.
The snow would be my fault.
The bullying would be worse.
"I'm not the Snow Queen!" I sobbed, lashing my hands out and striking the cushion of the seat.
"Please, calm down, Elsa." My mother tried to hush me.
I screamed louder, my words slurring together into incoherent suffering.
"Elsa," My daddy turned his head to look at me, taking his eyes briefly from the attention of the road. "You're fine, Elsa. You're going to be fine."
Because his eyes were on me when they should've been on the road, he didn't see the thin sheet of ice spreading itself across the road in a deadly patch.
He only took his eyes away for a second, but a second was all it took.
Our car started spinning, completely out of control.
We must have slid into the other lane; the lane with oncoming traffic.
Two white lights came from no where. I remember seeing them before everything went black.
They were the headlights from the car that slammed into us, head on.
I sink to my knees, losing all strength to keep running.
The hobgoblins have caught up to me.
I lay down on the mud of the forest floor.
The rain pours down over my already drenched body.
I'm soaked to the bone and my body is convulsing from the chill that has reached my core.
I unwrap my arms from holding myself close. It seems pointless to try to keep the pieces together when they've already fallen apart. It seems pointless to try to hold my body heat close when there isn't any left.
My parents had been pronounced dead on sight. I walked away with hardly any more than a scratch.
My parents died because of a stupid patch of ice.
In the back of my mind, I've always felt like that ice patch was my fault.
If I'm enough of a monster to strike my own sister, than who is to say that I'm not enough of a monster to kill my own parents?
The kids at school always told me I was the Snow Queen.
In the back of my mind, I started to believe them.
When my parents died from a patch of ice... that was my fault, wasn't it?