24 1.21 — And You All Thought I Was The Stalker

Fudge the vow! I-I can’t do this!

From the college and all the way to the bus stop with torn-up posters, the dead witch kept on following me by walking atop the walls, jumping across trees and shops.

Never saying a word, never stopping for a fresh breath.

She just kept on stalking me relentlessly.

I kept trying to ignore her. Tried to act like I wasn’t the least bit affected by her presence but fudge that. I was affected by it.

Shit scared me!

Not in a horror sort of way but…it’s like you lose a slap bet with someone and instead of choosing to slap you now, they decide to hold that right, that power over you.

That unused slap holds an influence upon you that you just can’t overlook.

Each moment of theirs makes you think—‘This is it, they’re gonna slap me now.'

And you wait for that palm to hit your cheeks, you brace yourself for that pain.

But that pain never comes, yet also, in some ways, that pain hits you and just never stops.

You live in the constant fear of getting slapped until one day when you have your guard down and eating a nice cone of cookie dough ice cream, a giant palm meets your cheek at an alarming speed, too fast and too out of the blue for you to dodge, leaving a giant red mark on your face a feeling of embarrassing sting while others laugh over your demise.

…above events are not based on past experience. Yup, definitely not. But if they were, do not try playing such life-threatening games. You could lose your life or end up in jail.

Not really, but still.

Boys are monsters. God, why do we do these things to ourselves? Are we secretly masochists?

…Yeah, I don’t want to imagine myself like that.

Moving on from that horrific self-realisation that I’ll repress in the dark corners of my mind for eternity and beyond, my current situation felt a lot like the above scenario.

I was fine as long as my friends were still walking beside me until they weren’t and walked in their directions. Leaving me all alone to confront the stalker glaring at me.

I obviously didn’t want to go home. Well, I did, more than anything, but I didn’t want to risk giving out the location of my home.

And while the chances of her knowing my address were already high, I liked to imagine a more positive scenario wherein she simply came upon my college by simple coincidence and waited out there for me to…I don’t know, kidnap me again?

Maybe threaten me? To make sure I didn’t say anything about yesterday to anyone? Not like anyone would believe.

Maybe she—and her friends—didn’t want any witness to their top-secret mission.

But they were dead. What sort of top-secret mission did the dead perform? Haunting?

Was haunting an organised event conducted by these dead souls to someone gain power or something? That’d be pretty wicked and cool. Bad for me in the current scenario but cool, nonetheless.

So yeah, going home wasn’t a choice but so wasn’t staying out in the open in the crowd.

For some reason, despite of her invisibility powers, she made no effort to confront me.

First I thought she didn’t want to do it in front of my friends. Leave no witness, remember?

But now that I’m alone, she’s still just keeping her distance away from me—oh no, wait, she-she’s coming towards me!

Quick, act natural! How do I act natural? Am I standing naturally? How do I stand naturally? Do I keep an arm on my hips? No, you idiot, I’m supposed to be standing like a normal guy that’s waiting for his bus; not some rich guy in a fancy car who’d roll down his window and ask for my rate per hour…or it per night? It was still afternoon, per night would just seem weird, not to mention a little ambitious and this is not the time to go on a tangent!

My life is on the line here, gotta keep it together!

Did she notice me that I noticed her noticing me?

“Oi, human,” she whispered with her grated teeth from behind me. And not gonna lie, I literally squealed and jumped atleast half a foot in the air.

Obviously, people stared at me which made me revert back to my ‘natural’ pose.

I seriously need to learn how to stand naturally.

I turned around slightly and slowly to come face-to-face with the face of a short Asian girl with black eyes and a perfectly shaped eyebrow raised with a questioning look and a hint of annoyance.

“Now, if you’re done with your weird antics and playing the game of cat and mouse, I would like to speak with you,” she said, looking around to check if anyone else was listening in to our conversation. “In private,” she added with a smile that was more fake than the hair on our accounts teacher’s head.

In a dazed state, I tried to refuse but before any form of words tried to escape the confines of my mouth, the mage had already turned around and started walking in the direction of some alley.

For a moment, the thought of just running away did cross my mind. But then so did the image of her floating book and, if I’m remembering right, her clawed hand.

So, obviously, I chickened out and followed miss wolverine and just prayed or hoped that this wasn’t the last stupid decision I’d ever get to make in this short life of mine.