The next morning felt strange. The air in the house was thick and heavy. I passed my mother in the kitchen and called out a cheerful good morning, but she didn’t even look up, staring blankly out the window. Assuming she was just tired, I headed to school. That’s when the real dread set in. Nobody would look at me. Hallways parted around me in complete silence. When I found my boyfriend, I reached out to touch his arm, but my hand felt strangely numb. He didn't turn around. Instead, he just stared straight ahead and whispered into the empty air, his voice trembling with a terrifying blend of grief and anger: "Why did you do this to me?"
I stood there, wondering what I could have possibly done, begging him to answer, but he looked right through me. Panic spiked in my chest. I bolted out of the school and ran all the way home.
As I walked into the house and began heading up to my bedroom, a sound stopped me dead in my tracks. It was my mother. She wasn't just crying; she was screaming—a raw, gut-wrenching wail of pure agony. I raced down the stairs to find flashing blue and red lights reflecting through the windows. The front door was wide open, and police officers stood in our entryway.
I rushed to my mother’s side, screaming, "Mom, what's wrong? What's happening?" But she didn't even blink. She just stared right through my chest at the officers. One of the detectives stepped forward, his face grim, and asked her if she was ready to go to the city morgue to identify the body.
Driven by a desperate, unseen force, I followed her. We walked into the sterile, freezing cold of the morgue together. A technician in surgical scrubs stood over a metal table, slowly reaching for the edge of a white sheet. As my mother broke down into violent, hysterical tears, the sheet was pulled back. I leaned over the table to look, and my breath caught in my throat.
Staring back up at the ceiling, pale and frozen, was my own face.
