A/N: Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed my last story You Don't Understand at All.
Allie jumped straight up in her bed, the sound of the imaginary shot still ringing in her ears. She sat there in a cold sweat and her whole body felt jittery.
"Not again, not another one of those damn nightmares again." She whispered to herself.
Allie had been having nightmares ever since that night with Dean. At first they were her just reliving what had happened in his car, over and over. But now they were taking on new dimensions and came in different varieties. Sometimes it was Dean catching her somewhere alone, other times it was her trying to stop him from hurting her friends. And then there were the nightmares, like the one she had tonight, where she just stopped him once and for all. But regardless, it seemed like there was one at least every other night and sometimes multiple ones in a single night. The results would always be the same, Allie wide-awake in the middle of the night trying to convince herself that they weren't real.
"I've got to try and get some sleep." Allie thought to herself.
But it was easier said than done, especially tonight. The nightmares about murdering Dean were the ones that bothered Allie the most. Allie wasn't a violent person. In fact, she was the exact opposite. She remembered when her cousin Brad rented the movie Scarface and he convinced her to watch it with him. She didn't really like all of the profanity, but it didn't bother her too much. But watching people being shot every few minutes didn't really appeal to her and she spent half of the movie with her eyes closed. She didn't say anything because she didn't want Brad to tease her, but the idea of taking somebody else's life was something she just couldn't handle. Which is why these dreams about finishing Dean off were making her feel so unnerved. She truly felt bad about killing insects, how in the world could she possibly think about taking a human life, even his? And in her dream she did it with such little feeling of remorse. It felt good to fight back against her own personal bogeyman, but deep down she knew it just wasn't right.
"What's happening to me?" She wondered to herself.
Allie was also worried about something she had done in real life, and it wasn't a dream. When her father and mother had gotten divorced, her Dad had left behind some of his personal things. One of those things was a revolver that he had gotten from his own father. Allie had put herself under a lot of pressure by keeping what had happened with Dean a secret from everyone else and she didn't know how to handle it. Allie had known where the gun was kept at and decided, after one of her first nightmares following her assault, to get it and keep it in her room. Even though she didn't have any bullets for it and she never took it out of the shoebox it was kept in, it made her feel a little more secure knowing it was there in the room with her. But eventually her sense of security from the inanimate object faded and the nightmares started getting worse. It had gotten to the point that she had started secretly drinking alcohol, in an attempt to keep from thinking about everything. That's when the idea first crossed her mind. She seriously thought about trying to get bullets for the gun and then using it on Dean. But she didn't know how to use a gun and even if she did, she didn't think there was enough alcohol in the world to get her to go through with it. That's why she was so grateful when her friends intervened when they did.
One night when Allie felt she was on the verge of losing it, Nadia, Kendra, and Brandy came over to her house to pay her a visit. They talked to her and told her how much that they cared about her. Finally, she felt like she could tell somebody about what had happened to her. Talking about it made it feel like a huge burden had been lifted off of her. Allie gave the gun to Kendra, who then gave it to Brad and asked him to get rid of it. The girls all comforted Allie and gave her the courage to tell her Mom about what had happened. It was her Mom's idea to get her into counseling and to see what their options would be in trying to file charges against Dean. They went to go see Ms. Sauve, the guidance counselor at Degrassi. That's when she and her friends learned that Dean had done this before when Paige, one of the most popular girls in Degrassi, revealed the secret she had been carrying with her. Dean had done this to her too. Paige told them that she had already started the process of trying to get Dean prosecuted, but it was more difficult than she thought it would be. After listening to Paige, Allie and her Mom decided they would still go ahead and press charges against him too. For a while after she started going to counseling, the nightmares had all but disappeared. But when the D.A. told Allie that they couldn't keep Dean in jail and that a trial would be months away, Allie started having the nightmares again and this time they were way more intense.
"What am I going to do?" Allie thought to herself, "Am I going to have a nervous breakdown or something?"
Allie sat there on her bed for about another hour and then finally she drifted back to sleep.
Since it was the holiday break Allie was able to sleep in late, despite having another rough night. When she finally arose around mid-morning, she got up and went to the bathroom to get herself ready for another day. Once she had gotten herself together, she put on some of the new clothes she had gotten for Christmas. Then she went into the kitchen where she saw her older cousin Brad sitting at the kitchen table. He was watching the news on the TV that was in the living room, from the inside of the kitchen.
"Just because they call it Winter Break, doesn't mean you have to go off and hibernate." Brad said as he greeted his younger cousin as she entered the room.
"I can hibernate if I want to. Besides, what difference does it make to you?" Allie replied.
"I just worry about you is all. After everything you've been through, I don't want you to go and cut yourself off from the world again." Brad told her with concern in his voice.
Allie knew that Brad meant what he said. Even though he was her cousin and liked to joke around a lot, he actually treated her like his younger sister since he had been living with her and her Mom for so long. He had been living with them ever since he was about ten or eleven because his parents couldn't, or just didn't, take care of him. He would never go into exact details, but from what she could gather about his parents, they apparently had problems with drugs that didn't leave much time to care for a child. Brad never really talked about them much and she couldn't ever remember him making an effort to go and see them when he had gotten older.
"I'm not going to cut myself off, but thanks for asking." Allie replied.
"No problem, 'light-pole'." Brad said to her.
"Shut-up." Allie said with a smile, knowing Brad was just teasing her.
Allie thought back to when she was younger and Brad gave her that nickname because she was so tall and skinny, especially for her age. Allie still let him call her that just because it reminded her of a time in her life when things were a lot simpler. When she became a teenager, she started 'developing' earlier than most of the other girls her age and it really bothered her at first. She looked like she could pass for a girl a couple of years older than she really was, and she hated how some of the immature boys would tease her because of it. But after Ms. Hatzilakos sat her down one day after class in grade seven and told her how she had gone through the same thing as a young girl, it gave Allie the confidence to be able to ignore the comments that the other boys would make about her.
"Oh, I almost forgot. Nadia called while you were asleep. I told her I would have you call her back when you got up." Brad said as he turned his attention back to the TV.
"Okay, I'll call her after I've had something to eat." Allie told him.
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Next Chapter: Allie pays a visit to Nadia.
A/N: As always, feel free to post your comments in the review section.
