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Chapter One – Charlie
You never knew what secrets someone could be hiding. On the outside, they could wear a perfect mask, hiding all of their darkest secrets, stuffing every single skeleton from their past into whatever closet they could, never to see the light of day again.
I had secrets. Of course I did. And like a lot of people, I tried not to think about them.
Someone else around me had a pretty big secret too, and it was because of that secret that I currently drove aimlessly with no destination in mind. I’d been driving for hours. It was a good thing my gas tank had been full before I’d pulled out of my parents’ driveway.
I was nineteen years old, going to the local community college to get some general classes done before I transferred to a more expensive school to complete my major—don’t ask me what it was, because I was still undecided. I… I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t going to have a future, that the world would crumble before I had the chance to find my own footing, so what was the point?
It was about three AM. Pitch-black outside. My windows were rolled up since it was early spring and the nights were still pretty cold. I’d taken the highway out of Youngsville, and then drove wherever my gut led.
Why was I driving alone, in the middle of the night, with no destination in mind? Hell, I was still wearing my fuzzy pink pajamas.
I wasn’t running away, if that’s what you were thinking. No. I just… I needed some air. I needed to think. I needed—God, at this point, I didn’t know what I needed. A miracle. A twist of fate. Something that could help me figure out someone else’s secret.
Earlier, I’d gone to bed as usual. I wasn’t someone who stayed out late or hung out with friends often. I still lived at home, was a regular homebody, and I much preferred to get comfy on the couch and turn Netflix or some other streaming service on and binge watch whatever new show was out rather than go out and party.
I’d tried. I’d tried to go out with friends before, a few times, but let’s just say I’d learned my lesson, and up until tonight, my parents’ house was the only place I felt safe.
But feeling safe anywhere was a lie, because it never lasted.
Anyway, let’s wind the clock back a few hours, shall we?
A cold chill woke me from a dreamless sleep, and I groaned and pulled the thick comforter up over my head to warm myself up. Usually that helped. This time it didn’t. This time, the cold didn’t dissipate, and I rolled over to my other side and reached an arm out from underneath the blanket to grab my phone on my nightstand.
Had to turn the brightness all the way down, but once I did, I saw it was just before midnight.
Not nearly time to get up, so I set my phone back on my nightstand and tried to fall asleep again, but sleep never came, and that cold feeling had started to seep through the blanket and steal my warmth.
I pulled my head out from underneath it. There was no way my room should be this cold. When my eyes darted around the room and spotted the window on the other wall parallel to where my bed was, I realized why.
My window was open. Wide open. Wide open and letting in all the cold night air.
The not-so-funny thing was, I never opened my window. I never opened any windows in this house. The screens in a lot of them were screwed up, so my parents had tossed them years ago because they looked like trash and therefore made the house look like trash. I’d been living without a screen for the last ten years, and I refused to open the window in my room because it let bugs in.
I was slow in sitting up, unable to take my eyes off the window. With everything that had happened lately, this couldn’t be a coincidence.
The message requests from burner accounts. The uneasy feeling I got when I was walking by myself between classes on campus. The way it felt like someone was always watching me, waiting for me to be truly alone.
My heart was in my throat when I crawled out of bed and shuffled to the window. Before closing it, I leaned outside and looked both ways. My room overlooked the backyard. In the moonlight, all I could see was the old swing set inside the fenced-in portion of the yard. Nothing else.
My parents had a few acres. Beyond the fence sat a heavily wooded area that housed the treehouse my older sister had begged our dad to build for her when she was little. Claire had outgrown it almost immediately, but I never did. I hadn’t visited it lately.
I shut the window and locked it, and when I turned to head back to bed, I froze. Near the window, I had a small wooden desk. My room wasn’t huge; my parents weren’t rich or anything. It was big enough for a dresser, a twin bed, a closet, and a desk—and it was on that desk, where my textbooks sat scattered that I saw something that definitely shouldn’t be there.
A white envelope.
Swallowing, I inched toward it, and when that envelope was in my hands, my nerves shook. I didn’t know what to expect, but when I opened it and pulled out a folded paper, I wanted to vomit.
The paper was folded into three equal parts in order to fit in the envelope, and on it sat a rough sketch that, in any other circumstance, wouldn’t be so awful. But here, and in the middle of the night to boot, it was definitely high up on the creep factor.
With only the moonlight coming in through the window, I saw a sketch of me, my long hair messy around my head in a halo of strands, my head turned to the side, a blanket pulled up to my chin. My lips were parted just a bit. Even in the sketch, I looked peaceful.
Because it was a sketch of me while I was sleeping, and someone had drawn it while here, in my room—and the worst thing was, I hadn’t even noticed, and that opened up a whole world of awful possibilities.
I dropped the sketch to the carpeted floor, letting the envelope fall with it. I took a step back, my mouth open, my lungs burning with the sudden pressure of what felt like a mini panic attack. I couldn’t breathe, not really. The weight of it all pushed down on me, suffocating, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
I’d thought I was safe here. I was wrong. Whoever had been stalking me online, whoever had been giving me the creeps during the day between classes… they knew I lived here, and they were just in my room.
