ella-shepard

It__ all in my mind.I__ in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy."You need to wake up, Ella."The words are a command I cannot obey.

When you wake up, your face will be dry. But that doesn__ mean you didn__ cry.

I__e made her relive, over and over, the last few days,_ I say softly, watching Ms. White__ body. ____e had to fill in the blanks with my own feelings and experiences. She__ spiraling around those last moments, those times when she went against me, and she__ feeling it from my side, the pain, the betrayal.__he thinks she__ awake. I__ doing to her just what she did to me. I__ making her feel what it was like to slowly go crazy, to question everything. To watch my mother die. To fight for my life against my best friend. To feel the man who loved me try to kill me.To know that the woman I trusted as much as my own mother betrayed me.That__ what I__ making her feel.I__e turned her into me, and made her live the life she forced me to live.Over and over and over again.

How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me.

We keep sending colonies up into space,_ Akilah says, __nd we don__ even know what__ at the bottom of the sea.___eah, we do,_ I counter. __ish and stuff.__kilah laughs. __e__e barely explored the sea. There are places where the water is so deep that it has never seen light._ She sighs. __ would like to go to those places. I would like to sink down and down and down and see what__ hidden at the bottom.__he sea is a dangerous place because it makes you believe in forever. I stare back at the shoreline, where heavy boulders clutter the shore, a remembrance of the attacks during the Secessionary War. For all the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, more are dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea. I tread water, turning slowly, so the island__ behind me and all I can see is the blue-green waters. The sea goes on forever and ever. We are tiny, almost invisible specks. It could swallow us up. We are less than the bright stars of the night sky, compared to the vastness of the sea.And it is this place, as one tiny, barely visible speck bobbing in the water, where Akilah feels safe.Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.

I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom__ answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.__h, of course!_ Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. __ow could I have forgotten?__nd now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don__ know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not.