Chapter Text
She's gone.
That's what Kenny kept on saying. Over and over in my head I heard the words. Loud and clear.
I knew that he knew I'd already accepted it. Those words were mostly for Samael.
It all felt an old math problem that I just went along with, even though I didn't understand it. I understood nothing.
I'd gotten past the point of crying every waking moment. One time I heard Kenny say, "Damn, it's like a drought here. No more rain to make it all dark and dreary."
No one laughed, and I wondered why he thought that was even a funny thing to say at all. I felt angry with him, even though I knew he was only doing his very best just to keep going, like the rest of us. I felt angry with my dad. With everything.
But I hated Rayne most of all. I hated how she left us with not a clue, not even a hint, to why or where she went. I hated how every single time I seemed to find her again, she disappeared...as if I got to close...as if I spooked her away.
Sometimes I thought, in the deepest darkest depths of a sleepless night, that maybe...Rayne had never really been here at all.
Rayne wasn't real.
And then I pinched myself, imagining ripping a paper with the words of that utterly horrifying thought written delicately on it. I couldn't believe that my brain had ever conjured up such a thought at all. So why did I keep thinking it? Why did the ripped up paper always reappear, untorn, right in the forefront of my brain right as sleep almost overcame me? I hardly slept because of it.
And sometimes...only very, very occasionally...a girl's face would fade into my brain along with the paper, like she was giving it to me. As if she found it in the trash, glued it back together, and handed it to me, as good as new. She had dark short hair, with two familiar silver hairpins clipped to her bangs. Her smile was warm. It reminded me of Rayne's.
I knew who this girl was. Rayne's ex-girlfriend. But her name illuded me. I hated this girl even more than Rayne herself. I hated her and her manipulative, kind smile...and I hated her insistence that the girl...the girl who I'd known half my life, the girl who played with me at recess, the girl who sat with me at lunch, the girl who walked me home after it got dark, the girl that saved my life...she...she wasn't... No. Rayne was real. I knew it. She was alive and she was still out there. I couldn't give up on finding her. I'd go with Samael, I'd do whatever it takes to prove the dark-haired girl wrong. I would prove to her that she no longer had control over Rayne and I's relationship. She didn't get to tell me how to feel about her. Rayne was my best friend. My best friend.
She was my...she...she was my everything. My big sister I never had, my playmate, my shoulder to cry on.
But she's gone.