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After: Flashes of Light


Ashley

I stared at the phone in my hand as the dial tone replaced the strangest phone call Nick had ever given me. I hit the redial button and waited. His phone just rang and rang and rang, Journey blaring out at me as his ringback tone. After a solid minute and and a half of Lights, it clicked into voicemail.

"Leave one."

"It's me," I said, "Call me back. Now." I hung up and waited.

Nothing.

I got up, pushing my covers aside and pulled on my sweatshirt, shuffled into my sneakers and made me way into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and pulled out a Red Bull. I stared at my cell phone, which I'd put on the counter, and waited.

Still nothing.

Still in my pajama bottoms, I broke my one golden rule about wasting money on cabs and called for a ride to Nick's house. It wasn't far, but at four in the morning even the kitchen was a hike. I didn't worry about how my hair looked or if my make-up was smeared and blurry. The cabbie looked at me like maybe I should've at least taken a glance in the mirror before he turned back to face the road.

When we got to Nick's house I tossed my money onto the seat beside the driver and climbed out. His house was dark, but I let the cabbie drive off anyway and I walked across the lawn to the front door and banged on it with my fist. "Carter!" I shouted, knocking all the harder. "Get your ass out of bed, pretty boy!"

With every knock, my heart echoed an equally intense beat. Intensifying the more obvious it became that he wasn't home.

I checked my phone for missed calls. Still nothing from him. I tried calling again.

"Leave one."

I stood there on his front lawn, staring up at his house. "I swear on the Buccs, Nick, if you're pulling some kind of stupid prank, I'm going to kill you."

Then I tried breaking into his house.




Nick

Flashes of light.

Flashes of light. They say you see your life flash before your eyes when you die, but all I saw was flashes of light and flashes of her. Her red hair, her freckles, her ugly orangey-red lipstick. I saw her nose that was a little too narrow for the rest of her face, and her oversized, almost protrubent blue eyes.

I could hear stuff, too. But it was weird stuff, like being underwater. I picture the sound of the air bubbling clam in my fish tank to sound like this to all the fish and stuff. The suckers on the bottom of the star fish's legs as it walks across the glass.

Flashes of light.

I feel like I maybe am blinking, or drooling, or maybe both. My mouth feels funny, my arms are longer than they should be. It's like I'm an alien or something.

Flashes of light.

And Dogface.