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Everything was great at the start. It was a classic love story: Girl meets boy, they fall in love, happily ever after. She remembered it well now, the day she met him. She was at the cinema with her friends when she’d seen him standing there, on his own. He was a cute boy, with a cute smile, and Crystal just knew she had to have him.
“Go talk to him,” one of her friends, Layla, said, pushing Crystal in David’s direction. She giggled, handing him a ticket. They went to the movies so many times after that, kissing in the back row.
Things were always so fun with David. Even if Crystal’s idea of fun those days involved stealing designer clothes and making mean jokes about strangers on the street. Being with him was a rush. It made her feel more alive than she had in a very long time.
She could tell him all her secrets. Even the psychic stuff didn’t phase him at all. He told her he thought it was so cool, that she was so cool and clever and gorgeous. He told her all those things, whispered them in her ear while they were cuddled up in bed. Again, it felt like a perfect love story.
But it wasn’t a love story, Crystal realised way too late. It was a horror movie; one that she was made to watch against her own wishes, from the dark corners of her mind that David had hidden her in while he paraded around in her body.
Even now, when he was locked away, she could still hear his voice in her head threatening her, mocking her. As though even buried under that tree he could get to her. It was awful.
At night, she had nightmares about David running around free again, torturing her again. In the morning she could feel his hands on her. She tried to scrub him off in the shower, to drown him out with music, to replace the taste of him in her mouth with Charles’s, but nothing ever helped. He was always still there.
So when she was all alone in her room, and he was driving her insane, she yelled at him.
“Asshole!” she screamed in the mirror, hoping he could hear her. “You took everything from me!” There were tears prickling behind her eyes. “And then I took it all back, but you’re still here! Leave me alone!
“You used me! Stole my body and did horrible things with it! And the worst part…” she inhaled sharply, tears rolling down her cheeks. “The worst part is that I didn’t see it coming. I loved you and you betrayed me. I would have done anything for you.”
She was sobbing now, frantically trying to wipe away her tears. She should be over this by now. Why wasn’t she over this? “And that was no one’s mistake but my own,” she whispered to nobody but herself.
She stared at her reflection and saw a girl with red-rimmed eyes and a broken heart stare back at her. She resisted the urge to shatter the mirror.