In case any of you were curious, the title of this chapter is Finnish... other than that, I've nothing to say.
Mandy Teslow opened the door to her home to see Ashley sitting in a chair in the hallway, looking into the living room. She looked over when she heard her mother shut the door, got up, and walked over to her.
"What's wrong, sweetie?" Mandy asked, going over to her oldest (or, rather older now) daughter.
"There's… something you need to see…" Ashley said, heaving a sigh…
While her mother looked at the aftermath of young Bonnie Teslow's suicide, Ashley headed upstairs to her youngest sister's room.
She had never suspected her little sister would kill herself… she was always so happy… she never seemed too depressed at any given time…
Her room looked perfectly normal; it was left just as Ashley had remembered it being. There were no signs that there was a girl crying out for help. Ashley sighed, and sat at the head of the bed. She felt something underneath her, and immediately stood up. Digging underneath the sheets, she found a small book.
Upon discovering that it was a journal of sorts, Ashley flipped to the last page; surely her sister wouldn't mind her reading her diary now. The most recent entry was dated as the week before.
I'm feeling a little depressed right now. And tired. But that's probably because it's 3:45 in the morning. I can't believe it either… I just can't get to sleep. Maybe I'm thinking too much… I'm not sure what the reason is, really. It's just that everything's been getting to me lately… life's been getting more complicated… and it's not helping that Kurt and I are hitting a rough spot in our relationship… ugh. I'm just not feeling like myself lately. I mean, I've been staying in… I always go out with my friends, but I've caught myself lying to them just so I wouldn't have to go out with them. Even my closest friends; I lied to them, and I never do that. I've been lying to my family, too, another thing I never do. I've been feeling pretty upset lately over a lot of things… a whole lot of stuff has been going wrong in my life; too many things for me to list. I've also been thinking a lot lately about stuff like love and philosophical stuff… I guess my life hasn't been all that great in the past six months anyway, but it's taken a really bad turn these last few weeks. sigh … I just need to start picking up the pieces. I'll write again next week.
Ashley slowly put down the small book. She hadn't even noticed any of the things Bonnie had mentioned in that entry. She seemed as cheery as ever in the past few weeks, not depressed as she had said in the diary. The only thing Ashley was remotely aware of was that she and Kurt weren't getting along very well. The rest was a shock to her.
She sighed and walked over to the dresser. On top of it was Bonnie's sketchbook. Ashley always said that her sister had amazing drawing talent, which she did. Flipping through the pages, she saw the familiar drawings of famous actors and actresses adorning the first dozens of pages. Johnny Depp… Scarlett Johansson… Ewan McGregor… Keira Knightley… Raviv Ullman… David Spade… then Ashley reached a page which surprised her. It seemed to be a short paragraph written across the paper but it was scribbled out so that she could only discern a few scattered letters, but the message was so obscured that she couldn't decipher it in its entirety. She spent a good five minutes looking at this oddity, then turned the page, and realized that the scribbling may have been the beginning of her depression. The next picture showed a limp hand being bitten by a spider. On the next page was a man holding a woman in his arms, the woman bleeding at the neck and the man with blood trickling down the side of his mouth. On the following page was a picture of two old men, one of them with rather skeletal-like features, pointing at something off of the picture and laughing at it. Other pictures included a giant cannibalizing a man, a veiled woman dressed all in black in front of a coffin with blood staining her hands, and a large crow pecking at human remains.
Ashley shut the book quickly and tightly, not wanting to look at it anymore. She dropped the book and fled the room. The sketchpad landed, open to a drawing of an arm resting on the side of a bathtub. Carved into the skin of the arm, with blood trickling from the wounds, were the words "I'M SORRY".
Ashley nearly flattened Keely as she rushed out of Bonnie's room. "Hey, Ash… w-what's up?"
Ashley opened her mouth to say something, but decided against it. "Nothing, Keely…" Her sister shrugged, and the two walked downstairs, to where Mandy was talking to a uniformed man. Keely's throat hitched up as she saw two men carry a body bag on top of a stretcher through the hallway and out the door. Ashley just sighed, and rubbed her forehead. Upon seeing her daughters, Mandy brought the two of them into a hug.
"Hey, mom," Keely said, being squeezed half-to-death.
Yeah, hey mom, Ashley thought. How was that welcome-home surprise?
After a few minutes of conversation with their sobbing mother, Keely sighed deeply. "Uh, mom? Would it be okay if I went over to Phil's for a while?"
Mandy smiled. If anybody could make Keely feel better about this whole thing, it was Phil. "Sure, honey…" She tried to smile.
"You can come along if you'd like," Keely added. Ashley and Mandy obliged, and the three of them drove over to the Diffy residence.
Hey, that review thing last chapter was so fun, I think we should do it again now.