Okay, now that Paul and Brian's origins have begun, what about their sister Ashley? What's happened to her?

Let's see...

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London and Kendrick's Suicide Table

Dedicated to NeroAnne, Terrahfry, Redsandman99 and Seraphalexiel

by Green Phantom Queen

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Chapter 4-Ashley's Soliloquy

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My name is Ashley Marie Helmsley. I am the only biological child of Stephanie McMahon Helmsley and Hunter Hearst Helmsley. I am daddy's little princess as you can see, but really, I pride myself on being an independent gal; at least I used to feel that way.

It has been around five months since my brothers' disappearance. From December to May, I studied hard in my Freshman year of High School and made it to the top of my class with flying colors. But did it really help? I doubt it; I isolated myself to make me better, to make sure that I made up for my brothers' loss...

However, it still didn't help me either way. I was nagged by my parents more so than usual. Through those times, I sort of began to understand what Paul and Brian were feeling when dad was hounding on them. Always taking more time in getting himself ready for a match, and sleeping with mom...when was the last time he truly took a look at my test scores? How long had it been since we really sat and ate together at the dinner table? Were we ever going to go have a movie day like we always did?

My friends don't agree with what happened; they think just like my father. They think that they went away with some whores or prostitutes and are now fathering a pregnant woman, making them unable to come back home. I knew better; I knew that Paul and Brian away for a chance of escape. And escape from what, I don't know.

But five months after they left, an incident happened in the San Antonio Amtrack Station, that would spur my role into leaving my parents, and Austin, forever...

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"This is Todd Grisham, reporting for the Austin Night news!" said the news reporter in front of the San Antonio Amtrak Station. "At lesat 21 high school students—12 male and 9 female—threw themselves toward the oncoming train in the station behind me!"

It was said that the group were all having fun, talking to each other..but when it was time, they all linked hands, swinging their arms back and forth, chanting three words over and over again, as if it was some sort of magic spell...before they jumped to their deaths.

"One, two, three...One, two, three..."

I saw it in front of my own eyes on the television that day. It was horrifying...Todd Grisham—who was known to be an excitable news reporter—was actually stunned to silence when he reported the fiasco. Blood spewed everywhere, drencing most of the potential riders of the train, the news stand....it was as if a mass event greater than to what Stephen King's Carrie did to to the main protagonist. I couldn't sleep for days and just the thought of the possibility of Paul and Brian being there was just shocking. I would sometimes have nightmares about them coming back home, with most of their faces scarred from being run over by the train, blood dripping from their mouths and basically asking me to join them.

Naturally, my parents only thought it was just stress from all of the tests I had to study for, but deep down, they knew what was going on.

I wanted to be silly, and I wanted to be just like my classmates. Like all girls my age, I wanted to be loud and silly, and not give a damn about the future. I never wanted to cry; I hate crying. I never wanted to cry, and let me become a mass of sorrow for people to sneer at.

It was around 4PM that day; just a few days before the beginning of Spring Finals. The school I went to was pretty big, and my classroom was on the 4th floor. I was squatting upon the edge on one of the open windows, seeing Austin's sunset.

"Ashley, get down from there!" cried a voice.

Ashley turned around seeing Kofi Kingston rushing up to her, grabbing on her arm, as if to help keep her balance. Ashley just laughed.

"You thought I would jump?" She asked Kofi. "Nah. But, have you ever contemplated suicide?"

"Never." Kofi replied. "And neither should you."

Ashley ignored im as she jumped onto the floor, and went toward her book bag.

"Maybe my brothers killed themselves." she added, giggling. "You know that recent suicide in San Antonio, right?"

"Of course I do." said Kofi. "It was all over the news."

"I hear that most of the victims remain identified." Ashley replied, picking up her notebook. "They're still trying to separate all of the meshed up bodies after all--"

She rolled the notebook until it looked like a megaphone as she cried, "There were 21 in total hand in hand, all chanting, 'One, two three..one, two three...'"

"You sound amused." said Kofi.

I sounded amused, I wasn't amused, though.

"They were so happy when they jumped right?" asked Ashley, positioning the notebook as if it was a telescope to stare at Kofi. "My brothers might've been there."

Kofi took the notebook from Ashley's hand into his own.

"They might've run away you know." Kofi replied before placing the notebook near his mouth as if it was a megaphone. "They ran away with some girl."

"Really?" asked Ashley.

"Really." said Kofi with a serious tone, unlike him. Ashley had known Kofi to be a very active and popular boy in the Freshman class. Hailing from Ghana, he was active in the soccer team and swim team. The girls were in love with him, but got angry when he decided to befriend Ashley due to her family and the rumors of her brothers' disappearance.

"Maybe they did run away to some girl..." Ashley mused to herself.

"What's wrong with you?" asked Kofi. "You want your brothers to be dead?"

I understand, Paul and Brian. I know of everything. I know you're both alive somewhere; at night I can hear your heart beats. And sometimes, you're right beside me when I sleep. You guys can't be dead...not yet, anyway.

"Of course I don't want them dead." said Ashley in reply. "But I know a bit about the suicide. For example, how did all those teenagers manage to meet up at San Antonio? It's simple; they all came from different high schools."

"How do you know that?" asked Kofi. Ashley just walked toward Kofi and took the notebook in his hands into her own. She then smiled at him.

"It's a secret." She answered with a wink. "And I know what it is!"

Ashley then began to run off.

"Hey!" said Kofi, soon following after her. "Tell me the secret, Ashley! Wait for me!"

Ashley ran down the hallway, a big smile on her face as she ran toward the computer room.

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I immediately typed down my user name for hara-kiri. Because of my desire to not become a heaping mass of sorrow, I called myself that. "Massaro." It sounded like Mascara in a sense, as when you are in sorrow, your mascara gets ruined (well, if you are wearing mascara, anyway). The webpage loaded, and I soon showed Kofi what I had found days ago: a black screen with red and white hearts.

"Look at these." said Ashley, pointing at the screen.

"What are those?" asked Kofi.

"The red hearts are women, the white hearts are men." Ashley explained.

"And what's so important about them?" asked Kofi.

"Because the night before the suicide, 12 white hearts and 9 red hearts appeared on this site." Ashley answered back.

"So you keep a tally on the hearts that are shown on here, big whoop." said Kofi. "Why did you want to show me this?"

"Because they're a sign." said Ashley with a mysterious tone.

"A sign?" asked Kofi. "You mean it's a signal for suicide?"

"That's exactly what it is." said Ashley in response. "Or maybe it's a threat."

"Hey, look at this!" said Kofi, pointing to the screen. In place of the hearts was one simple message which seemed to resonate inside Ashley.

"Am I connected to myself?" Am I, Paul and Brian?

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After school each day, I was immediately stuck on my goal to get A's on my final exams. But sometimes when I got home, there was arguing. Mom and Dad having fights were rare...but after my brothers' disappearance, they became more frequent. Every time there was an escalation, it felt like the whole house was shaking under the tremendous force of an earthquake. I hated it; nothing could block the sound of my parents fighting. I just wished it all stopped.

Dinner was never easy; it was always silent, and no one said anything. I learned to cook for myself—because sometimes my parents had to have an important conference in Connecticut—and it only added to the dissonance, because I felt as if I was going to get criticized for something I never did. It was there that I became Massaro, Ashley Massaro. A girl who was the opposite of the wimpy crybaby that I wanted to be; she was tough as nails, flirty, and all around a cool person. She represented everything I wasn't: She wasn't one who strived for good grades, or got hassled due to rumors, or who was self-conscious about her body. She was someone who shrugged it all off, head off to the mall to waste the day away and live only for the present.

I spent most of the time sleeping in my brothers' room rather than my own. If it wasn't that, I was just looking around for clues that they had left. Being adept with the computer, I used the computer in their room to search for any hints on their whereabouts; that's when I found out that Paul and Brian had an account on hara-kiri, and that they had met up with the creator of the site in San Antonio, the same place where the suicides occured.

I wanted to tell that my brothers were in San Antonio, but the fact that my father was now wrapped up in his wrestling, and that mother was trying to get through the stress of losing her sons made me unable to have the heart to reveal my theory. We were all breaking apart, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I then thought of something the night before Spring Finals: "What would Ashley Massaro do?" Ashley Massaro wouldn't give a damn about what her parents had to say. She would go spend money that should've been used for college on tattoos and piercings. She would walk in high heels and a tight top and get cat calls from all the guys. It was that thought that made me more determined to leave. I would.

That night, I logged onto my hara-kiri account and looked at some of the messages. I got one from someone known as 'HooliganZ'. I read it to myself, trying to figure out who it was from; somewhere deep inside my soul told me it was Paul and Brian calling out for me, telling me to be with them.

To Massaro:

Subject: San Antonio.

Ashley, it's us. San Antonio is great. We love it here. HeartBreak Kid is treating us nicely—well, nicer than how mom and dad treated us—and we have become good friends on the site. Also, now that we're both online, be nice to us, okay? Oh, and are you connected to yourself?

We talked to you about HeartBreak Kid before, right? When he decided to call himself HeartBreak Kid...that's when everything began. At the San Antonio Amtrack Station, he had a special locker where he kept some of his sacred treasures. But they weren't really treasures; they were just stuff that people didn't give a shit about anymore. He gave each of these treasures specially 'memories', because he didn't have to give a shit about it either. There were different things inside: a medieval goblet, an urn, a feather boa, and a silver locket just to name a few. Everyone there had to give up something—as part of his new memories and discarding some of our old—and we gave up our masks. We jokingly called them our 'second skins'.

But as we were there, HeartBreak Kid made us feel something...we were all so similar. Maybe the two of us were fabricating our past to become someone new. We're no longer Paul and Brian. We're HooliganZ, that is who we are. We finally became the people we wanted to be.

And now, everything is our own pop-up book. Isn't that wonderful, Ashley?

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Throughout my Spring Finals, that message played in my head. Connections, fake memories, second skins...what did it all mean? Along with those thoughts, I was also thinking of one other question.

If I ran away right now, what would my father, Hunter Hearts Helmsley, do? What would 'The Game' do? What would the 'Ten-time World Champion' do? How would he know anything about us? Would he start to piece things together from my journal, or from all of the notes that I scribbled in my room and my brothers' room? He'd probably find it accidentally while searching behind my special Rob Zombie poster.

"Ashley's handwriting." That was what he would say to himself.

And it would evolve; Stephanie would probably get on it too. Then, the two of them would work together in finding my whereabouts. They'd take all the time they had at home in order to find me—and most likely all the time Hunter had whenever he wasn't called for any shows. They would share their thoughts, but they had to work as a team, because any unspoken idea was the difference between a lead and a loss.

Dad may have been a rebel in his child hood, but he had street smarts. And in this world, street smarts could save you from any situation. He thought he was doing good by letting us move to Austin; he thought it was a paradise because we were rich. It was a paradise, apart from dangers in the world. Not anymore; Austin's now a bleeding corpse. But is it because of hara-kiri?

"What's your connection to you, and your family?" "How are you connected to yourself?" That would be probably spinning in his head, and probably through Stephanie's head too.

Would Hunter understand what I discovered for myself? During these past few months, I learned a few things.

The Kliq exists. You cannot deny it, because it is everywhere. Everyone has heard of the Kliq, but are either too afraid or too stupid to confess.

Members of the Kliq meet on hara-kiri. It is considered the Kliq's main way of attracting people to join them. They subtly add links to their site in unexpected places and the people succumb into logging on and to become someone else.

And finally, the hearts on hara-kiri represent suicides. Red hearts are women, white hearts are men.

I stopped writing my paragraph for this essay. What exactly was I writing? Was I writing a statement, or was it a question? Was it information, or was it an answer?

I finished my Final exams earlier than everyone else. I used that time writing down what I knew, and what I thought I knew about hara-kiri in my notebook. These thoughts might become potential notes for Hunter to use. He'd probably write so hard that he could read it on the next page....

I wonder...What would happen if I went to San Antonio? Who would the blank pages with a pencil to discover what I wrote? I managed to reach my brothers' hearts...would Dad be able to reach mine?

The bell rang, signaling the end of my finals. I tore out the papers in my notebook and folded them neatly. I then scribbled down a message to Kofi. I told him that he was the best 'friend who was a boy' I ever had, and that he shouldn't cry for me. That he should be happy that I am not going to be burdened by all of the hardships that were given to be my so-called 'friends'.

And that the next time he wanted to meet up with me, that he would have to call me by my new name. Ashley Marie Massaro.

I went home, and I packed. I ate dinner in silence. And when night fell, I ran away from home. Nobody in the neighborhood was going to care that I left; after all, people disappear all the time. It wouldn't matter if I vanished, right?

That night in Austin...it was the last time that I would ever see its beautiful sites for a long time....and as I was sitting on that bus, waiting to reunite with my brothers...I just knew that I would never revert to Ashley Marie Helmsley ever again...