Pretty Dark Nothing Read Free

The right one followed, but the left one moved a fraction of a second later, stalking her. “Jeff?” She whimpered his name.
    Her shadow stalker leaned forward, bending at the waist until its shaded lips touched her ear. Its cold breath sent a shiver through every muscle, freezing her in place. “They’ve already gone to class with no thought of you. Look around. You’re alone, Quinn,” it said.
    Waking up would be the only way to get out of this nightmare. Quinn pinched herself hard enough to leave a mark, pain flooding her arm. She gasped, fully awake.
    The other shadow joined in, bending forward like its doppelganger. “You did see them though, right?”
    She stuck her fingers in her ears and hummed Mary Had a Little Lamb, but the voices wouldn’t be hushed. Shadows don’t talk. Your crazy sleep deprived mind is making it all up.
    “Kissing, groping. They can’t get enough of each other.”
    She rocked back and forth in rhythm with the song, as if the repetition would drive them from her mind, but it only made the voices louder, more determined.
    “Did he kiss you like that? Like he wanted to devour you?” The voices provoked her to remember their last kiss.
    “He said he’d call you every night. Did he? Six weeks, and he called you how many times?”
    Quinn shook her head, the humming turning to singing. She didn’t want to think about how he’d promised he would call every night, but after the first week, the calls all but stopped.
    “And that kiss before he left?”
    Their last kiss, the worst kind of kiss, the kind you give a sister, a peck.
    “No.” The shadows confirmed the very question that crossed her mind. “He never loved you . Not like he loves Kerstin.”
    Quinn choked as her throat tightened. Now they were reading her thoughts. “Get out of my head.”
    The dark Quinns laughed and joined hands. “But you’ve got us. We’ll never leave you.” They circled her, dancing, singing, and teasing, like psychotic little children on a playground. “Kerstin is pretty.” The dark masses spun past her, blurring everything in gray mist.
    “Shut up,” she pleaded under her breath. Quinn looked up to see a short, blond girl stop half way up the steps to the school entrance and stare at her, mouth agape. Did the girl see them too? Quinn pulled her hands through her hair as if she were brushing it back into a ponytail and not covering her ears and talking to disembodied voices. This is what it feels like to lose it. Padded cell, here we come. The girl looked at the ground and hurried into the building.
    “Kerstin is smart.”
    “Shut up,” Quinn snapped.
    “Kerstin is … ”
    “Shut up!” Quinn’s words echoed off the cars in the empty parking lot and collided with the clang of the first period bell.
    “You’re late, Quinn.” The taunting spirits snickered.
    Balling her fist, Quinn closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and took a swing at a smoky face. Her fist collided with air, and when she opened her eyes, they were gone. She stood alone, shadow-less in the perfectly normal parking lot on a normal school day. But in that moment, everything had changed. Either she had fallen asleep, or her nightmares were no longer the stuff of dreams.

CHAPTER TWO
    Aaron Collier shifted his backpack over his shoulder and glanced down the hall as he deftly spun his locker combination, glancing up between numbers to make sure Quinn hadn’t escaped into the cafeteria. Just fifteen rows away, she flickered in and out of his vision as the crowd of hungry students came and went.
    In AP English, they’d been put in the same discussion group to debate if Hamlet really loved Ophelia. Quinn curled her hair around the finger of her left hand, strangely silent, as he’d argued Hamlet’s love for Ophelia had been true, but his need for revenge had overpowered all other emotions.
    “Quinn, what do you think?” he’d asked.
    She’d startled. Her eyes locked on his: bloodshot, tired, no makeup could have hidden