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Louis keeps seeing you in places you shouldn't be. In the music room, for example. He sees your smiling face leaning over the piano. The sight of just... you made Louis choke back his sobs. It was his fault you had gotten bit on that day. Stupid, stupid, stupid Louis, too distracted for him to notice you hadn't been feeling good. Now you're dead. Deceased. It was too late for you when he realized you had a chunk missing from your midriff.
Your missing presence was obvious to the boy. Not a single day goes by where he's not reminded of the fact that you're absolutely, without a doubt, gone. You can't come back from the dead-- not the kind that moves, anyway. You're dead. Gone, gone, gone.
Louis misses you everyday. He misses your energy, your warmth, your "stupid toothy smile" as he used to put it. He visits your grave everyday. Louis misses all of what makes you, you. Now you're no longer a person, only a rotting, decomposing corpse six feet under. You're just food for the grass and trees.
It's still a mystery on how you managed to hide the missing chunk of flesh, red with blood, the skin around the bite speckled with blood. At the time, you seemed just fine. "My stomach just hurts, that's all," you would wave it off like it was fine, when it wasn't. It was too late when your friends caught on. The fever had already set in, your face pale, eyes tinted yellow. It wasn't like you could be saved anyway; if the dead had gotten a limb, you could've been saved-- just a swing of an axe and you would be on your merry way. But alas, whatever deity up above must have been drunk, because there was no way whatever god up there would have taken such a perfect being like you with a sober mind. If heaven exists, Louis thinks, you would be up there dancing happily to whatever song you liked, and Louis would be down here on Earth killing the alive and the undead and everything in between.
It hasn't even been five days since you have left, and Louis is already hallucinating. Your face, stunning, behind him in the mirror. You at the picnic tables, staring intensely at the card in your hand. You in Louis' bed, faceplanted onto his pillow. You were everywhere, and while before Louis would have loved to see your face everywhere he goes, following him like a lost puppy, now it's like you're taunting him. "You couldn't get to me in time, Lou," he hears your voice cursing him for letting you die, as if he doesn't do that enough in his head.
Louis had been left by too many people. His parents, Marlon, his best friend, and now his partner. It's like the universe decided only he was getting taken apart, mentally tortured. Louis, you can't say that, dude, he chided himsel. Other people are grieving too. You're not the only one.
But, of course, he continues to blame himself. For every death leading up to yours. Your face continues to haunt him, to spit at him and laugh at him. And now, Louis is starting to think you're right.