DISCLAIMER: Obviously I don't own anything, I'm not making any money off of this. I don't know why I suddenly got nostalgic for this series, but it's pandemic time and I need to do *something* with my time. Content Warning: There are graphic descriptions of violence (shooting) in this chapter.

I know now that it would have happened regardless of whether or not my sisters were home. It was just a coincidence that they weren't.

Eddie was away at a conditioning camp for athletes.

Beth was spending the night with her friend Leslie, who lived on several acres of land outside of town and owned horses, Beth's new passion at the time.

I was home with my parents that night because I'd gotten into a fight with my best friend Jennifer and we weren't speaking. At the time, it seemed important. I don't even remember what we were fighting over, now.

We'd been back in Ohio for two years after we returned from living in a town called Buckman, West Virginia for just one year, where my dad had been a football coach for their local college. After the exchange year was up, he returned to his old job back in our hometown in Ohio. He was popular and well liked.

Sometimes, my parents had to be out late for faculty fundraisers and charity events, even during the summer and off seasons. That evening, though, they were home. They went to bed at their usual time, 10:00pm. I stayed up late to read under the covers, which wasn't out of the ordinary on a random summer night. I fell asleep sometime around midnight after my parents had gone to bed with my book open and the flashlight still on.

I didn't expect to wake up until morning.

Instead, I jerked awake when I heard the shotgun blast and the terrified shriek of my mother. I yanked the covers back and sat up in the darkness, my heart slamming against my chest. I clapped my hand over my mouth to prevent myself from screaming out automatically. At first, I was sure that it was all a nightmare. I'm imagining this whole thing and any minute I'll wake up, I remember thinking.

Then she screamed again and I heard another shotgun blast.

Her screams were silenced.

I sat rigid in bed, doing everything in my power to stop myself from making a single noise. The creak of the floorboards outside of my parent's room followed by the deep, angry muttering I could hear coming from that direction confirmed that I wasn't having a nightmare or hallucinating. I was awake. This was happening in real life.

Footsteps walked down the stairs slowly, away from my room, away from my parent's bedroom. As soon as the sounds of the person disappeared down the staircase and into another part of the house, I ran to the door of my room and flung it open, dashing down the hall towards my parents.

What I saw will never leave my memory.

My dad lay sprawled in the doorway. He was on his back, his brown eyes wide open, and a hole larger than my fist in the middle of his chest. He was surrounded by blood and I knew without checking that he was dead. Tears blurred my vision and I kept my hands over my mouth. As I stepped closer, I hoped against sense that my mother was alive, that I hadn't heard the second shot kill her too.

My hopes were crushed when I saw her in a heap on the floor near their bed. Her eyes were closed with blood on the bed, the floor, and even the walls. I shook uncontrollably at this point, tears spilling down my cheeks as I tried to maneuver my way into the room without covering myself in their blood. My sobs were silent because I knew the person who'd done this was still in the house. I dove for the phone extension near their dresser when I heard a male voice from downstairs.

"Is there someone else up there? A person to play with? I'm coming for you..."

He walked towards the stairs. I pushed the bedroom door closed and locked it, knowing that whoever was down there would see the closed door. And then they would know without a doubt that someone else was in the house.

Someone they'd missed.

I grabbed the phone and ran to their bathroom, sliding in the blood. I closed the bathroom door and locked it, too, before climbing into the tub. I pulled the shower curtain closed and dialed 911. I was on the phone long enough to give the operator my address and tell him that both of my parents had been killed by an intruder that was still in the house. I wasn't silent enough, because the intruder found me.

He blasted his way through the bedroom door first. I screamed into the phone and the operator tried to calm me down. There was nowhere to go. My parents bedroom was on the second floor. I tried to open the window in their bathroom, but it was nailed shut from the outside.

He blasted his way through the bathroom door, too. He yanked the shower curtain aside and pointed the gun at me. I knew then what it was like to have your life flash before your eyes. His eyes were wild and a thin sheen of sweat coated his face. I didn't recognize him, but he looked young.

He pulled the trigger as I screamed, but no blast came. Horrified, I dropped the phone with the operator still on the line and launched myself out of the tub. The intruder grabbed my arm and flung me to the floor and into the shower glass. I screamed at the top of my lungs, hoping a neighbor had heard the shots and called 911, too. Since he was out of ammunition, he hit me with the back end of his gun.

He hit me over and over until everything went black.

I woke up in the hospital two weeks later, with a cast on my left arm and right leg and stitches criss-crossing my arms and body and on the inside of my lip. The doctors and police told me afterwards that after beating me unconscious, he dragged me out of the bathroom and tossed me down the stairs, which was how I broke my arm and leg.

I'd hit a table with glass, which broke, which was where all the cuts came from and why I needed so many stitches. He left a trail of destruction that wasn't difficult to follow.

The police showed up and chased him down before he could finish.

Eddie and Beth sat in my hospital room, their faces red and puffy from crying. They acted afraid of hugging me too hard, as if I would snap in half if they weren't careful. I might have; the hospital had to piece me back together, like Frankenstein's monster.

The next several weeks were a whirlwind of activity that I coasted through silently on autopilot. My mother's younger sister, Beatrice, arrived to take care of everything. I have no idea how she did it, but somehow she pulled herself together enough for my sisters and me to organize and plan their funerals, which hundreds of people attended. She hired movers to pack all of our things into boxes and ship them to her place in New Orleans. She did this all while consoling the three of us.

The man that killed our parents was a former football player who'd been cut from my father's team due to failing his drug tests. He went on a drug binge and had some kind of temporary psychotic break, or so his lawyer claimed. He was convicted of two counts of second degree murder and one count of attempted murder. He's on death row now, with no chance of parole.

I barely remember the funerals, but I do remember that it was a bright, warm and clear day, with only a slight breeze in the air. The perfect day for a picnic or a game. In some ways, it made the funeral even harder to bear. I was still bruised, swollen, battered, covered in stitches and in casts and in a wheelchair when I went. I didn't speak to anyone for an extended period of time. It wasn't until everything was cleared up with the police that Aunt Beatrice took us back to her home in New Orleans.

The first thing Aunt Beatrice did for my sisters and I was hire a grief counselor to talk to us. I'm sure that the grief counselor felt as if I was unreachable, in the beginning. I didn't want to talk, not to anyone. How could she understand what I'd seen? What I'd been through? Had this happened to her? My sisters didn't understand either. How could I tell them?

I had frequent nightmares and panic attacks, both in private and in public. I couldn't handle being in dark places alone or at night. Just leaving the house became difficult because I sensed danger everywhere. I woke up daily, screaming myself hoarse from the dreams and flashbacks. Aunt Bea decided that the best thing for me was hiring a bunch of tutors to homeschool me while Beth and Eddie attended a local private school for girls. I spent my 7th grade year at her sprawling southern mansion, completing work online and through the tutors she hired. The grief counselor was always there to help and talk when I needed it.

After that first year, life became somewhat normal again. Eddie was on as many teams as she could handle, playing volleyball in the fall, basketball during winter and then baseball in the spring. She spent a lot of her free time in Aunt Bea's exercise room, conditioning and working out. Beth threw herself into various extracurricular clubs, mostly involving volunteering. She got into student government and joined the track team. The two of them carved out their successes at school easily, throwing themselves into other things to keep busy.

Although I wasn't sure I would still enjoy it, I joined the drama club, dance and choir when I finally returned to school outside of Aunt Bea's house.

It took a while for me to get used to the new version of normal, but by the time I entered high school with my sisters, I'd begun to crawl out of the dark hole I'd slid into.