My Eyes On You

Anger

Torn by humiliation, dizzy from drugs and alcohol, he separated himself from the party. Just before he jumped off the high cliff, several people noticed that he was missing. But no one went after him***.

Leah hated herself for having feelings for Brendan. She told no one about it. It was, essentially, her deepest, darkest secret. She would rather people think she hated him than loved him any day. The latter would humiliate her as much as Jeremy had been humiliated that

January night.

So one day, she confronted him.

It was a blistery winter day, and Leah was just twelve. It was right around the time that the police had stopped interrogating all of the kids who had been at the party, and the town of Early Winter was recovering from the shock of Jeremy‟s death.Everyone was satisfied with Brendan‟s account of what had happened that night, and even Jeremy‟s parents were

willing to move on.

But Leah wasn‟t satisfied.

One day, she paid him a visit.

“Brendan, I know you‟re responsible for his death.”

He was so charming and so suave, especially for a twelve-year-old. Even when he said, “Is that so?” he sounded like a good guy.But Leah saw right through him. From the very beginning, something deep within her recognized the evil that lay beneath the surface.

It could have been the evil within herself that

allowed her to see it; but at that moment, her skin crawled and the hair on the back of her neck stood up and a bracing

shiver shook her body so hard that there was no mistaking it in Leah‟s mind.

It was subtle, but it was there.

She re-opened the door to her bedroom after a full day at school. Her backpack was still on her shoulders. It

was dark outside again, and the trees were shivering

restlessly.

The impending storm had still not come.She had an odd feeling—as though everything in her

room had been disturbed but then put back into place.She rushed to her closet, her stomach sinking the way it does when the elevator goes too fast.

Her hands were shaking out of fear this time. Please, God. Let it be there. Let it be there.

She pulled it out from behind the sweaters; exactly where she had left it. She let out a huge breath, lightheaded from the sudden panic. It was in her hands,

and everything was alright.

“Leah?”

She spun around, her heart thudding in her chest. She lowered the g*n, which was still wrapped in the silk. What

was that?

It had come from downstairs. Her mother was calling to her.

“Leah, are you starting your homework?”

She couldn‟t find her voice. After breathing deeply,

she said hoarsely, “Yes, Mom.”

She closed her eyes. Some birds were chirping happily just outside her window. She was overreacting. She had never owned or done anything illegal in her life; that was

why she was having such a hard time right and every other time since she had first laid hands on the g*n.

As she continued breathing deeply, calming herself down, she sank into her bed. Her head throbbed and she was

dizzy. It wasn‟t the legal consequences of owning a g*n that she was worried about, she thought; it was the mere thought of being stopped from what she knew she had to do. And that was to take back all the hurt that had been inflicted

upon her and kill Brendan Caldwell. With fiery passion, she knew that she would not be satisfied until and when he was lying on the ground, his head split open and bleeding.

She had come so far and had done so much. She had figured out the right person to go to in order to buy a g*n. Cameron: sweet, gentle Cameron, would never betray her. She‟d left no trace of her intentions besides her silly poetry; but that could easily be destroyed.

Her record was so clean you could wipe your face with it. All her family, friends, and teachers thought of her as something of a goodie-two-shoes. It was only the low-class, rowdy boys who thought of her as a w***e. Boy, would they be surprised when the police

interrupted class to put handcuffs on her. “Going down in a blaze of glory,” or so the song went, she would finally show the kids how their cruelty really made her feel; and what it could really make her do.

She let out another breath, finally feeling more at ease. It was only her imagination that someone had been in her room, she thought. She looked at the g*n, stroked it, then decided to lay it on the desk.

She was obsessed, and she knew it. Thoughts of Brendan consumed her mind day and night, dominating her

life, thoughts, and actions. She woke up and breathed his name. She went to school and hunted for him in the halls.

She rode home on the bus, looking forlornly out the window, dreaming about the day when she could finally put an end to

all her sorrows and kill him. What an exquisite and glorious release from t*****e it would be to finally be rid of the person who was responsible not only for the tragic end of someone she had loved so fully and completely that she couldn‟t imagine a day when they would be apart, but also for the inconceivable t*****e that she had had to endure privately for more than two years now.

Stewing silently in her anger all this time, she saw no other way out.

She wanted revenge.She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out her

yearbook from the previous year. Blindly, she opened it to Brendan‟s picture. She hated him for being so photogenic. There he was, a broad smirk on his face, his dark brown

hair curling under his ears. She sneered at him. He had taken Jeremy‟s life but he wouldn‟t claim hers—of that she would make sure. Turning on her music and placing the earphones on her ears, she pulled out a pair of scissors and began cutting.

She didn‟t want to just kill him; she wanted to make him suffer first. She wanted him to shake with fear the way she trembled with love for him.