==> Jade: Try and figure out how you could
have been evicted in the first place.
You bite on your thumb nail while you
look down at your paperwork, headphones on
as your coworkers talk about--about something--
about gas prices being high and minimum wage
going up, about how those two things correlated.
You hardly cared about that at the moment--in
fact, if you could, you would leave the Skype call
and focus solely on the other, bigger issues in your
life. Specifically, the eviction notice, your grand-
father and easing his worries, taking care of your-
self, attempting to not gather attention to yourself
with how silent you’re being. This doesn’t seem to
bode well with the universe.
You look up from the red and pink piece
of paper, still nibbling on your nail. You make a sound
of confusion and well hidden fear as the talking
hesitantly slows, as if your name hadn’t been spoken.
You stop biting your nail to turn and look behind you,
taking out an earbud, frowning slightly. You heard it
clear as day--it was Rose’s voice. The Rose who had
to be reminded of middle school years you never went
through to know who you are. The Rose who forgot
everything, along with mostly everyone else. The Rose
who is just an imposer of your best friend. You shake
your head and put your earbud back in, dismissing it as
another trick of your mind, another hallucination, making
you think, once more, if the doctors are right, and you are
just crazy, and the Game wasn’t real. When you do this,
there’s a pain in your chest and you cringe, gently hitting
your chest with a fist. Your coworkers stop talking again,
and look at your from their places across the country.
“Miss Harley? Are you alright...?” One of
them, the heir to the company asks, fear in his eyes,
concern in his tone. You let out a cough and nod, smiling
in a manner to reassure them. But, it’s at this exact moment
that everything hits you at once. All the calculations you
missed, all the numbers, they all dig into your skin and make
memories resurface that causes the entire call to turn into
something akin to a help-line. Except you’re not listening.
You’re too busy losing it again. “M--Miss Harley, could you
speak to us? Is everything alright? Are you having another
breakdown? Do we need to call 911?” An accent--Middle
Eastern?--slips into his words, but, again, every word, every
syllable is a mere buzz against your skull, irritating and grating.
You feel the tears against your cheeks, but you
don’t have much control over your actions. Your body begins
to shake and your hands quiver as you look at them. Your
coworkers’ voices are raising in volume, from fear, from concern,
from uncertainty on what to do, but you still don’t hear them. You
only hear the screams of your friends, of those dying, of Dave, of
Kanaya, of Aradia’s last dying breaths, as you were the last to
fall--the one cursed with the most to remember. All of it.
Every single moment, every single battle, every single relationship,
every single argument, EVERYTHING--it was all inside your
head. Your own thoughts make you snap and you let out a garbled
sob--no, not even. It’s more a cry of pain than a sob, and you shut
your computer in inhumane haste, knocking almost everything over
as you grip at your head and scream. Loud.
==> Days without incident: 267 0
You open your eyes, in the middle of a panic attack, in
the middle of suffering from hysteria, in the middle of struggling
against restraints as you scream, scream, scream, about a game
that killed everyone, how it was real, how everyone just didn’t
remember, and then more unintelligible screaming.
You’re beginning to question your own sanity.