Truth of Dark Pasts by Serena Wood (free children's online books .TXT) 📖

as I step into the room, again looking confused and scared. “Stop, just… give me the knife sweetie.” again  I crouch down infront of her and this time she doesn’t move, she looks at me like a scared, trapped animal. “No… I have to finish this… I- I don’t want to live anymore.” she sobs out and there’s no way to describe the pain I feel when I hear her say that. She squirms away from me, “Ellie, you can’t do that . Just give me the knife, please.”

I reach out to take the knife and she jerks away from me, I only manage to grab hold of her wrist. “No!” she tries to pull away but my reflexes take over and I hold onto her arm. “Ellie, give me the knife!”

“No, let me go!” she pulls away again and I release her arm, only to hold onto either side of her face so that I can look her in the eye. “I’m not letting go, I can’t let you do this. Now give me the knife.” my voice luckily sounds a lot more calm than my thoughts and she stares at me for a moment, eyes still puffy with tears.

She drops the knife and startles me with a hug, sobbing more as she buries her nose in my shirt. “Shh, it’s okay.” I pull her closer and rock back and forth in an effort to calm us both.

I almost lost her. She could have left this world like that and she would have haunted me for the rest of my life.

I bite back tears and hug her tighter, just thankful to every god known to man that I had gotten here when I did. what if I had shown up just ten minutes later? I push the morbid thought aside and move to look at her arm, clinging onto my shirt. Red stains the blue fabric and the sight makes me sick to my stomach.

“I need to take care of your cuts.” I mumble once her sobs have calmed down a bit. She moves back silently and sits there, staring at the ground as I get the medkit from the cabinet. I wipe the cuts with disinfectant and wrap her arm in a bandage, all the while she doesn’t move or look up from that spot on the floor. I scoot closer and pick her up, preparing to take her anywhere but this dark bathroom. She doesn’t resist when I carry her out, she just buries her nose in my shirt again, like a tired child would. She seems just as fragile as a child, maybe even more so. She seems a lot smaller than she usually does, as if she tried to shrink down in order to hide from the world.

By the time I carry her up to her room and sit her down in her bean bag chair, she’s gone silent; no more tears or even the smallest sniffle. I look around the room, lost for a moment before I find myself staring down at my shirt. I stare down at the blood on it and realize there’s a little dried on my hands from bandaging her up.

In a panic I grab a bottle of water from her nightstand, riding me of her blood. I wipe my hands on my shirt and then peel the shirt off of me as if I were a guilty murderer. I walk over to her dresser, sorting through it to find another shirt but I stop when I hear her sobbing again. I walk back over to her, crouching down once more and rubbing her shoulder in an effort to calm her down. She barely seems to notice though, so I scoot her over and sit in the bean bag with her, practically sitting her in my lap but I don’t seem to care at the moment and neither does she. She hugs me again, her sobs becoming muffled in my hair. All I can think to do is go back to my back and forth motion and mutter little words of comfort.

Chapter 6 - "Moving Too Fast"

 

☀Ellie☀

I don’t know what happened, as I predicted it was a blur like every other time before. But this time was different. I didn’t want to stop. But someone had stopped me. Someone had charged in and stopped me, bandaged me up and carried me out of that dreaded bathroom; only to sit here with me in a bean bag chair.

I look up at River, muttering to me that everything’s okay. Still I wonder why she’s here and why she’s being so kind. I thought for sure that she hated me, but I guess even if you do hate someone you wouldn’t just stand back and watch them try to end their own life.

I realize after a bit that I’ve finally stopped crying and we sit in this surprisingly comfortable silence. she breaks the silence with a sniffle, “I’m sorry… This is all my fault, I’m so sorry Ellie.” she starts to ramble a bit, moving to hold me closer like I could really do something to make her feel better. I remain silent, not sure how to respond. Is this all her fault? Sure she had been friends with all the people that treated me like shit, but for obvious reasons I feel like this would have happened sooner or later.

But still I know she has a point, after all I knew something was different when she showed up at the hospital. She hasn’t been my friend for a long time so there was no reason for her to be around me… unless she felt guilty. That’s probably the only reason she’s here now, so she doesn’t have to be responsible if something happens to me; she can always say she tried to help.

“Why are you here?”doubt plagues my mind and the question falls from my mouth before I can stop it. I look up at her to gage her reaction and she stares back at me, confused. “W-what do you mean? I just thought you’d want me to stay… I don’t really want to leave you alone but I guess I can go if you want…” “No!” the protest pulls itself free before I can stop it. I’d gotten so use to her comfort that I start to speak out without any real thoughts to base my sentences on.

“No… I just thought… Why are you being so nice to me I mean?” The question finally stammers out of me. “Because I care about you, why else would I be nice?” she looks at me confused, as if it’s me who’s the odd one. It’s her who basically started all this, who gave up our friendship just to be friends with the “popular” girls that beat me up. If anything I should be looking at her like that, not the other way around. My thoughts grumble and for a brief second, it fuels enough anger to make me courageous.

“You don’t care about me, you’re a liar.” I move out of her grasp and she looks at me stunned, almost as if she’s about to cry. “No, I’m not lying… Look I can explain, I just…” her thoughts seem to cut short there, like she can’t even come up with a believable lie. I stand up in order to distance myself from her more. “Why should I have ever believed you? Every nice thing you ever said to me was probably a lie, I mean it’s not like you’d really care, you left me so easily for a new set of friends. I should have known better…”  “I never lied to you… No, I really do care about you, you were my best friend…  would you just calm down?” I start rambling and each time I stop to take a breath she tries to interject but it’s a pointless endeavor and it goes back and forth like that for what seems like hours but really it’s only a minute or so.

“I would have been fine, but then you showed up at the hospital and now you’re confusing everything. You don’t have to do this pity thing, you know, I wish you had just left me alone.” I keep my eyes glued on something outside the window but silence quickly draws my attention. That must have been the last straw for her. I turn around cautiously to find her walking towards me. She lifts her arm and instinctively I flinch, expecting a slap or hit.

But I don’t receive either of those things, in fact what I do receive is far from what I would have expected her or anyone really to do. She places her hand on my cheek, the other hand joining in the caress a moment later and instantly I’m silenced. I know I should be saying something, asking a question, anything really. But my mind goes blank, after all it only takes seconds for it to happen. Before I have time to react she leans forward and suddenly that berry smell and sweet taste come rushing back to me as if the events weren’t nearly a year apart. Just as suddenly as they reappear, I remember what happened the last time they lingered around and I realize she’s kissing me.

I pull away quickly, my thoughts starting to rush back to me as the kiss breaks. “What was that for?? You’re trying to fuck with my brain aren’t you? First you hate me and then you show up at the hospital and now you’re here trying to kiss me…” honestly, I don’t really have an excuse for not seeing it coming the second time. She cuts my sentence off with another kiss and this time I don’t really have the energy to pull away. I just stand there like an idiot and I don’t even take the opportunity to kiss her back. When she pulls away, in the back of my mind I start to wish I had kissed back; after all I never really got the chance at a kiss that wasn’t half sided last summer.

“I don’t hate you, I never hated you Ellie.” she mummers at last, forcing a tired smile onto her lips.

“But you…” despite everything she’s said and done in the past few minutes, my brain finds it hard to believe her and it struggles to pull out a protest; but I’m starting to get too tired to bother fighting back.

“I know I was terrible to you and I’m really sorry, but I didn’t mean any of it… I was just… being stupid. But I’ll fix everything, I promise.”

I stare at her for a minute in silence, my thoughts screaming out worriedly. Should I even bother to trust her anymore? ‘How? How are you going to fix anything?’ I’d planned on saying it, partly at least. I’d even opened my mouth and started to ask but it’s not like it would have done much good and I stop before I start. She looks at me for a minute and I can practically see the gears in her mind turning. Suddenly something sparks in her eyes, as if she found the answer to some silent question she was asking herself.

I don’t know how she