Hamilton Academy: He's Always Watching

Part Two ~ Chapter Eight

"I was a glass that had finally been shattered."

-Amy

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AMY:

I stared in the mirror at the figure before myself that was supposedly me. My black dress felt tight and uncomfortable in the cool cabin. I glanced to my left at Julia's black skirt and top and to my right at Nancy's all-black outfit. Next to Nancy, even the usually cheery Tanya looked gruesome in her black attire.

I fingered the hem of my dress, biting my lip as I did so. The cabin was dead silent, but the silence had been a normality for the past couple of days. There was no more Kathryn to yell and scream at us for every little thing we did wrong. It's weird how used to something you get, and only when you lose it do you realize how much a part of your daily life it was.

And now Kathryn was gone, dead. There was nothing I could say to her. My last time hearing her voice was when she was screaming at Nancy about drugs. In this very cabin.

The image of her dead body flashed before my eyes. I suppressed a shiver as I thought about that knife I saw lying next to Kathryn, covered with blood. Mr. Grey had finally got his kill.

A victim of a murder...

I was convinced that Mr. Grey had killed her. For one, Kathryn had saved Ethan from the grasp of Mr. Grey. Second of all, he's the one psychopath at the school I know who would effortlessly kill someone like that. Third, the knife... The knife covered in blood that I saw lying next to Kathryn. The same kind Mr. Grey had. A knife used to kill off my counselor...

Yet, I couldn't even hate the woman. She had relentlessly mocked all of us in the cabin, every single day that I'd been here, but Kathryn had saved Ethan's life. And that forgives all that she's ever done to make me hate her.

Now I could never know why Kathryn had saved Ethan. There must have been a reason that she was there at that exact moment, there was always a reason for everything. But maybe some things are best left unknown.

My attention turned back to the situation before me. In the dark cabin, all four of us looked fit for a funeral. And that, precisely, was where we were headed on this morbid Saturday afternoon.

Joy.

***

On the bus to the funeral, I was somehow seated next to Nancy. I didn't complain or anything, because I didn't really have a strong opinion on who I was next to. Suddenly, a thought popped into my mind that I hadn't bothered to think about throughout the crazy week.

"Nancy..." I said slowly. "Do you know how Kathryn was really killed?" I braced myself for her response. She was there to see Kathryn's dead body, heck she was the one who found Kathryn. That must have meant Nancy saw the knife, the one that killed Kathryn.

"Internal injuries of course," Nancy stated simply, as if that wasn't something to be questioned. "Heart attack maybe? They didn't specify." She looked like she really didn't want to go into detail about it.

"Well, that's what the doctors said..." I pieced my words together carefully, as if to coax her to admit she had seen the knife too. But Nancy didn't say anything. "Look, Nancy, can you tell me what exactly happened that night?"

Nancy sighed and gave me a look. "Well, I was off to Joe's to get some more of this drug, he had gotten a great deal and ya know... It was raining hard and a storm was obviously brewing, but I figured I could get to Joe's without getting caught. On my way, I heard a scream. At first I could have sworn it was the wind. But there wasn't just one scream. There were more screams, one after another. Tortured screams, that's what they sounded like. I raced over to where I thought the sound was coming from and that's when I came upon Kathryn's body. I panicked and ran to you guys. You know how it all goes from there..."