She exposed Lizzy's awful behavior. She repaired things with Hector. Delaney should feel better, satisfied that her relationship with Hector was still strong. The feeling never stuck.
Delaney buried her face into her pillow, kept it pressed even when it became difficult to breathe. Schoolwork lay scattered across her bed, half-done and forgotten. Why. Why. Why did her thoughts haunt her? They followed her like a bad smell all day, whispering at the back of mind. Loud and clear in comparison to the endless droning of distant, ever present, voices.
She wasn't good enough, it whispered. That nothing was fixed or solved. Her friends must hate her. After all they've been through. . . the losses they suffered, that she would abandon them over Lizzy. That she will ruin her relationship with them like she had with her siblings.
No! That-that wasn't true. Delaney automatically lifted her head from the pillow to take a deep breath. Her friends understood why she wasn't talking to Lizzy. Right? But Chi was close to Lizzy, she helped her and Rowan finally get together. Had they taken Lizzy's side? No, they wouldn't. . . But they could.
Then there was her family. Clement and Madi still haven't emailed her back, and now she's yet to hear from any of her siblings. Delaney wished she could call mom or dad, but they haven't contacted her once since she made the move to the island. For the longest time Delaney rationalized that they didn't have the time. Heck, even when she was at home she never got to say more than a 'good night' to them. Mom and dad worked all day and came home to sleep.
They never wanted you, another mouth to feed when there were already too many. Your departure was their relief.
But I didn't just leave, Delaney thought. I left and took Clem and Madi's college fund. I took that from them and I can't ever give that back.
Delaney sniffed, tears were threatening to spill. She reached past her school books to the end of the bad and the trunk she kept there. From within she pulled out her thick tome of magic. She bought this forever ago at that magic place. . . The Overflow. The book had some kind of enchantment that turned the words to braille as she ran her fingers across them.
She read the book, losing herself to pages of spells and rituals. A lot of it was beyond her understanding, a lot of magical jargon with little context. There were pages she could follow, usually simple spells that required a few magic words. It took a lot of her focus to read, and that made it the best distraction. The voices at the back of her head might as well be a distant thrum.
Delaney read for what felt like maybe fifteen minutes but was actually three hours. She closed the book and yawned. Her phone buzzed and announced it was time for bed. She could hardly believe it was that late already, but gosh she was tired after reading her magic book.
Her bedtime ritual was simple, brush her teeth, change into her oversized Living Dead Girls tee then head to bed. Once tucked under her covers, and Georgette was curled against her, she tuned into the voices in her head and listened until sleep claimed her.
When exactly she fell asleep she didn't know. It could have been somewhere in the middle of a monotone description of a bug catching and killing another bug. Then she was dreaming.
Delaney was in a library.
It was an old library, with shelves of books that excepted up and up into inky blackness on either side and the smell of moldy paper permeated the air. Delaney walked forward, as it was either that or the other direction. She walked, and walked but the shelves seamlessly repeated and she never arrived somewhere else.
This is wrong.
Each book was distinct, with its own shape, color, condition, and every spine was clearly labeled. Except the titles were in some strange language that she almost felt like she could understand. Delaney would reach for a book, then her hand would be at her side.
This isn't normal.
That thought broke through the daze she had been in. Suddenly, Delaney could see an end to this row of shelves. A dim light called to her, though it's color was red. She moved towards the light, and suddenly she could read the titles on the spines of books. They had a theme: danger, go away. Her whole body trembled as she took that step out from the row of books that had sheltered her before.
Delaney saw hundreds, maybe thousands of rows of shelves connected to paths that stacked upon one another like layers of a cake. Each going up and up, higher than she thought she should be able to see into dizzying infinity. Up there, the rows twisted and bent in an illogical way that sparked fear in her chest.
"No." Delaney turned to look back down the row she came out of it. It twisted like a circle in jagged sections into impossible angles and geometry. "No, no, no." She's seen this before. She's been here. A place beyond mortal understanding. On instinct she turned and ran.
On and on, past row after row she ran and found darkness. The darkness. . . this was familiar. She could hear the drone of voices, monotone and her's. This was her darkness. But when she looked back she could see the distant silhouette of that library the pieces finally connected.
She was not alone in her own head. That whisper was not her's but some other being.
Delaney woke up screaming.
