Ok, I couldn’t say I didn’t saw it coming, to think that I’d find the love of my life after 6 months of texting with someone, having still 17 years old, it sounds just like something a knucklehead would say, especially living in 2020.
It maybe was different fifty years ago, or even twenty, before the internet and social media apps took over the dating market. But even if I’m not saying that it’s impossible to meet the person you’ll spend your life with while still young, It surely isn’t with all these gadgets at our disposal. Call me outdated, but I prefer the basic human contact, as you would probably already now… things get weird when our screens get in the middle.
I met Carrie at the start of her Senior year, she was… astonishing, to put a word to it.
She was one year above me and was transferred to Hollow Creek along with her family at the start of last summer. She was perfectly polite, courageously enthusiastic, and a blond-haired beauty with warm almond eyes. When we start talking, she told me about her reluctance towards coming here, her grief upon leaving her friends and past life behind, and how her unsympathetic father would mistreat her more than often.
Little could I relate to her with my poor social life, absent father and nearly to cero traveler miles, except for that part of having abusive parents, God only knows having my mother as… well, my mother, is a task more than enough to give me a purple medal for surviving till teenagehood.
Anyways, as I said, it all escalated quickly from that first encounter in Mr. King’s parking lots, when I found out she used to skip classes to smoke. For a split second, the cheapest family food restaurant in town became our sanctuary, and I became her confidant. We got to an agreement, she would let me accompany her as long as I didn’t tell anyone, goddam she would even text me every time she would think about going there.
I would try to be that good and supportive friend that’ll listen and encourage her on the harsh adaptation to her new place, and now and then what would just be a smoking pause would end up on long walkings sessions, naps on the grass and laughing sessions with all the greasy food you could eat. It would have been that ‘perfect friendship’ that I never had If I wasn’t for Jake.
Jake was the head of Hollows Creek basketball team, a socially overdeveloped 6 feet tall parents child who as you would think only by looking at his face, was a complete jerk and less obviously a psychologically non-diagnosed sociopath, something that somehow he managed to hide from people most of the time. What was worst of him it wasn’t his way to get out of any trouble exploding people’s empathy, or even that he and his group of friends made my life hell since freshman year, but the way in which he got into Carrie’s head.
Our friendship downgraded slowly from mid-year Jake Party, but like naturally attracted to each other, they started to hang out in raves, sport events, and more social-alike happenings of the sort. I would never blame her thought, she was a much more complex creature than me, and I didn’t fill most people’s social requirements.
I tried, believe me, to be there every time that she needed me, and even a couple of ones in which she didn’t, most of them at the end. Our relationship was based on closeness, confessing harsh feelings to each other, and most likely in the fact that she didn’t have anyone else to hold on to… I’ll be honest with you, I felt fulfilled, like my life had found it’s purpose, every time that she texted me saying she felt alone, that she hold my hand or cried in front of me. I felt the sun shining on her smile and my heart out of my chest every time she laid her head on my shoulder.
But that’s probably why I also realized very soon the fact that she was too much for me, and don’t get me grown, I fully understand that that’s not the right mindset or so to get the girl of your dreams. In any way I’m trying to play the victim here, I am certainly not. But I think it’s mature to recognize when you realize that something is been more meaningful for you than for the other person, sometimes we’re just expecting to be something more than it actually is… yes, we shared intimacy on a level I’d never had with a girl before, but for her… for her this was normality.
Although I tell you this in such a calm way, it wasn’t like that when I was passing through that, I would be humble enough to say that if part of the guilty was from Jake, for reasons that became obvious through this story, another half was mine. I just couldn’t hold it.
One day I was walking back home and I saw her at our place in Mr. King’s parking lots, so chilling with him in his truck. And God only knows why he let these things happen, but I’ll swear I saw them kissing. It had happened a week since the last time we meet, and what was a hunch in my guts since Jake casually started to get friendly in classes, turned into an “I’ve lost my marbles” type scenario. We had our first fight that very same afternoon at her place, and I confess to her my feelings.
Yeah, it basically went THAT bad.
And as you would guess she backed the hell out of me from that moment, cero contact either in person or social media. I went from being her best friend to a wallflower, watching how her relationship with mister privilege advanced as they became a couple, for months.
I won’t lie to you, that shit got me broken to a degree I hadn’t been before, I cried rivers and became so absent in my school life that it didn’t matter if I was going to every class. Somehow though, I lifted myself up after that episode with a new discovery and a renewed perspective of myself. By the end of the year, I was a completely new person, an unexpected landscape of possibilities opened in front of me as I explored this new ‘thing’ till… until we started texting again.
I know that is on the top of “What you shouldn’t do after a broke up 101” but hey, we didn’t even date to start, so I thought it would be ok. Till it wasn’t.
One night she suddenly appeared at my bedroom window, it turned out to be that Mr. Dumbhead Jake was even more abusive in-relationship if it was possible. They had started to have… ‘relations’ because of his insistence, and that same night he had cross some barriers she didn’t want him to do. She was a mess, and worst wasn’t planning to do anything to stop him, it was pure shock. So I did what I had to, comfort her, and work her way out of my house the next morning.
I won’t say that was smart in any way, nor good for me, maybe if I hadn’t been so in love of her by that moment I would have found another way, one to empower her into taking the right decision… but one of the things that I learned through all of this it was that I needed to take more courage, and fight for those things that I want. So I decided to play a little scare to Jake.
So when on May 9, Jakes’s truck crashed over the Hill’s fence at Broadwook Street at 1 o’clock, while accompanying Sarah Lewinsky back home, casually in front of me to take a photo of it and send it to Carrie, I thought everything was over. It didn’t even matter that after that the breathalyzer marked 0.26 in the hands of the attendant cop, or the rumor got spread all across Hollow Creek by the Hill’s daughter or even the members of the Parent’s Associations backstage. I would have bet anything on Carrie’s leaving that boat sale far away from her.
I really wanted to believe that, given my recent diploid of “Luck” things would turn out differently. That’s why when Carrie told me she needed me in Creekwoods for the Hollow’s night, I figured myself that the moment had come. Filled with a renewed sense of power, I appeared for the traditional student’s bonfire commemorating 2020’s graduation promotion.
Somehow I just manage to think that justice was made and that as the beginning of my last year in high school, Jake’s opportune fall and Carrie’s new interest in me would set the first step into a new way of living life, as a winner. She and everyone would finally realize the ‘us’ was a thing, that summer would be one of the best of my life, and we’ll manage to be together through her beginning in College.
So when in the middle of the bonfire I was bucket out in red paint, already intoxicated with an insane quantity of alcohol, right in front of Jake, and I saw Carrie…. I knew, as soon as I saw her, that not only none of that was going to happen. But that she knew about this.
That night the fire of the bonfire came alive, reach out to its limits and took over the forest, with everyone who was in it. In the aftermath, thirty-four students ended up in the ICU, and four bodies were found dead, almost burnt to the ashes.
By that moment, I had only three months into the discovery of this thing that I call ‘Luck’.
It started as a group of coincidences when I discovered that, If I thought hard enough about something, this would happen. And it became quickly into paranoia that time I bought a scratch-and-win, turning itself into a mindblowing by the fifth one. By the moment I manage how to make Jake’s truck deviate from the track, I’d already come across the idea that great power comes with great responsibility, but it wasn’t until I saw Jake’s head pour blood through every single one of his holes till his body fall dead to the ground, that I realized I was a potential harm to society if not contained, very much unlike our friend Spidy, I was able to hurt people in unexpected ways.
No one can unsee what happened, nor do I what I did, no matter how much everyone sorries the matter.
In what’s related to me, I just disappeared, hopefully forever. In what concerns to Hollow Creeks police department? I’m a suspect, potentially dangerous and on the running.
This is the story about how I, Oliver Dull, found at my 17’s that I have psychic powers, or some of the sort.
I still can’t describe what’s happening to me, how or even why.
But I can tell you that I won’t rest until I found it.