Eventually, Carmen did succeed in sleeping. It did not come easily, but, instead, with a lot of guilt.
She felt bad, of course, for yelling at Ivy. Carmen knew, on some level that Ivy said all of that in frustration and that she didn't really mean it. But Carmen wasn't sure if she meant what she had said.
She did feel that Ivy and Zack didn't really understand her. They both wanted a return to normalcy, which Carmen understood, she really did. They wanted the comfort of normalcy. They wanted their friend back. And while she knew she would always be there when they needed her, Carmen didn't want to return to normal. She felt restless most of the time. And yet she was tired. It was all so confusing to her.
Carmen wondered if she was a coward.
She knew she was running away from her problems, but she just couldn't slow down right now. Ivy and Zack wanted normalcy, to go back to life with their friend Carmen. But she didn't feel like the person she used to be.
It didn't help that she felt they were on edge around her. She suspected that they were keeping something from her. She tried to sort through her fragmented memories, but all that came to mind was a carnival of some type; she couldn't really remember any sort of context surrounding it.
It felt like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop around her. Like they were waiting for her to do something, but she just didn't know what. The answer lied in her memories, but she couldn't figure it out. (She suspected it had something to do with what Gray had said earlier.)
She sighed away the headache as she allowed her mind wander to less physically painful topics; she began to think about her argument with Ivy again.
Could her friends help her? She knew Gray could; he was helping her. Player and Shadowsan too. They understood VILE. But Zack and Ivy? She wasn't sure. She knew they couldn't if they kept on walking on eggshells around her.
She knew she was hurting her friends by taking a break and she desperately didn't want to. She called herself a coward.
Ivy was wrong about one thing, Gray was not VILE.
"If you want to spend your time with VILE and not your real friends, that's up to you."
It had been a cruel thing to say and it made Carmen wonder. What did her friends see when they looked at her? Did they see Black Sheep, or Carmen, or VILE?
A/N:
Another chapter. I'll add chapters as I finish them, lol. I just finished writing chapter 40. The title is from AJJ's Big Bird.