Love Lengths

Chapter Five

Maggie

I stared in silence, watching as his heels almost kicked his ass as he ran away from me; they always ran away from me - but this time, it wasn't my fault! With a huge sigh I plonked myself down on the cold, wet ground, regretting it the minute old rain water started to seep into my jeans, spreading across my backside.

Quickly, I rose to my knees, trying to brush off the wet feeling that now inhabited my dark skinny jeans; whilst searching in the darkness for the dropped knife he'd left behind. 'What am I to do with it if I do find it though?' I wondered, I had no reason to have a knife, not to mention the trouble I could get in for carrying one, I shuddered at the mere thought of having one slip and slice right through my skin, watching the blood seep through the cut and falling to the floor beneath me.

Underneath my right knee was what felt like a handle, fumbling around in the dimly-lit alley, I felt the wooden handle of the knife he'd dropped; I quickly shoved the knife into my bag, not caring if anything was touched by it. Despite him having been gone a good five minutes by this time, I couldn't get rid of the image he'd left me with; his tanned face stained with tears so prominent they could have been etched into his skin, acting as a path from his dark brown eyes, right the way down to his long, muscular neck. Did he recognise me? I knew who he was; hell! Everybody knew who he was! He was Kyle Johnson, the one that every girl wanted, and no girl could have; kind of like Edward Cullen, only not pale, and human.

Kyle Johnson, the tough guy that walked around as though he owned the show; Kyle that didn't need to walk around with his cronies for people to fear him; Kyle that could wink at you and you'd fall weak at the knees. Now the Kyle that apparently I could stare at and he'd run away crying.

They're all right. I'm a freak.

Realising I'd been stood alone in a dark alley for a while now I headed out and left towards the direction of home. Above, the clouds thickened in the midnight blue, October sky, obscuring my vision of the beautifully twinkling stars. Chunky blurs of darkness, showing off their billowy edges and claiming the sky as their own; only the light from the almost full moon could push through them. Like she was protecting her part of the sky and shining down on the world beneath her; trying to prove that she still had command of the sky, of her sky, as if saying to the clouds "I'm here so back off yeah?" I laughed at that then; it was no different than usual.

All of my life I had had to come up with my own humour; I had to come up with my own reasoning for things that I hadn't yet been taught; I had to use the little imagination that I possessed in order to create the friends that, as a child, I'd never had. Don't get me wrong, I like being alone; it’s so much easier than having to make friends that will leave because they don’t understand. It’s easier to hide when people don’t notice you anyway, and it’s easier to keep my own life a secret when no-one cares whether I’m in that day or not.

'You're special'; my nanna's voice rang in my head - she was the only one who'd known, the only person who'd been able to sympathise and feel the same way I did. She knew how it felt to have everyone else’s thoughts in your own head; a huge jumble of words and lies mixed in together every time you tried to touch somebody. She knew that the only way to escape it was to enter yourself into a life of complete solitude and loneliness. All I could think about as I wandered down the long empty road that led to our house was how much I missed my nanna, and how much she'd meant to me.

Warm, wet tears slipped down my cheeks as I plugged in my iPod, cranking it up as high as it would go on to my favourite song; singing silently away to myself as I finished the last legs of my journey, passing trees that I'd grown up running around. It was then, just when my red door came into view, that I heard him behind me, or rather, I felt his presence as he stalked behind me. I carried on, slowing a little as the c****x of my song came up, I turned on my right heel to face him, coming head on with only the darkness he'd left behind him as he fled to hide behind my oak tree.