My Hockey Alpha

Nina

Minutes passed, then hours. Soon, it could’ve even been days; I had no way of knowing how long I was down there. As time ticked on, the bright fluorescent lights in my cell never faded, making me lose all sense of time. I felt myself beginning to lose my grip on reality.

I couldn’t cry or scream anymore. Not only did my tears dry up and my throat became too sore to make another sound, but also I began to realize that it was useless. No one was coming for me. Maybe Edward was right; maybe none of the people who I had come to know over the past four years were even real. Maybe it was all just a figment of my imagination…

If they were real, wouldn’t they have come to save me by now?

After an indistinguishable amount of time passed, the voices began. They were soft at first, barely even whispers.

“Nina…”

A voice called my name. I ignored it at first, but it grew stronger over time.

“Nina.”

I shook my head. “It’s not real,” I whispered to myself, my throat so raw and sore from screaming that the words hardly came out. “It’s not real…”

“Nina!!”

I jumped. I knew that voice: it was Jessica. She sounded scared, like she was screaming for help. “Jessica?” I called out, but there was no answer.

The voices stopped for quite some time. I eventually began to think that I never had really heard them to begin with. Maybe I was dreaming; somehow, I must’ve fallen asleep despite the bright fluorescent lights beaming down at me from the ceiling.

started again. And it wasn’t just

bruised, and there was dirt under her fingernails. Her eyes had a whitish color to them, as if they had been glazed over with a thin coat of

your fault that I died,” she said. “It’s your fault that all of us

even swallow. “You’re not dead,” I whispered, shaking my head. She couldn’t be dead. Surely Jessica was home right now with

Jessica continued. She walked over to the side of my bed and reached out her cold, dead hand. It smelled like dirt and congealed blood. “All you ever cared

head away and scrunched my eyes shut, repeating my mantra in

real… This isn’t

dirty hands for my throat. I tried to scream, but nothing came out — so I turned my head in the other direction

bed, however, stood my mother and my brother. My mother was holding a baby wrapped in the strangely patterned blanket from the photograph. She was bouncing it

up!” she screamed as she

went to open my mouth to tell her to stop, that she was going to kill it, but only the same snarls came out of my mouth. Then, to my horror, she lifted the baby over her

as his body withered into nothing. His

its jaws to speak,

wishing I could cover my ears as the wails of my loved ones

real… This

all of

opened one eye first, then the other. I slowly looked around and let out a sigh of relief to see that I was

you,

even wearing the same all-black clothing. His curly brown hair was still ruffled from running through the streets as we sprinted away. If I lifted my head more, I could even smell him: smoke and leather. He had smelled like that when I laid my head