Full Circle

Chapter 2

Oh gosh! My head is pounding. I am scared to pull the covers off my face. I am beginning to remember why I am not a fan of drinking. I have an extreme hangover. On top of a headache, my stomach hurts, I am lightheaded, and I am starving. I don’t want to miss the complimentary free breakfast buffet, but I feel too shitty to move enough to grab my cell and check the time.

Regardless of my agony, I slowly removed the covers from my face. The light leaking in from behind the curtains is very unpleasant, so I began digging around in my bags for some aspirin and sunglasses.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any aspirin, but I figured coffee would do the trick. I felt very weak and tired, but the thought of food overpowered my pain. I threw my hair up in a bun, put my oversized sunglasses on, and walked over to Ana’s bed.

“Ana?” I whispered and gave her a little nudge. Her only reply was a long moan. Clearly, she was feeling the same way I am.

“It's 9:00 am, they are going to stop serving free breakfast soon.” That seemed to get her attention.

When she flung her covers back, I realized that neither of us ended up changing into our jammies before bed.

“Must have been a fun night huh?”

I laughed and replied, “Must have, I don’t remember coming back to the room.”

“Neither do I,” she said while making her way to the bathroom. When she emerged, she looks a lot like I did. Hair up, shades on, and in serious need of some coffee.

Awe, the smell of breakfast foods. Blueberry muffins, bacon, sausage, pancakes, and the best part... COFFEE! My stomach hurt and the smell of food was making it twist and turn in ways that I am pretty sure is unnatural. Both Ana and I hit the coffee station first.

"Let’s grab a tray and head back to the room," I said while taking the first sip of my peppermint mocha.

While devouring my breakfast, I could not stop thinking about Logan. It is not like me to connect with someone so quickly, but I also wonder if it was just the alcohol. I let the thought of seeking him out to at least get his number fade away and begin packing my things.

“Can you drive home” I beg Ana. “I want to spend the hour-long car ride sleeping before my shift at the restaurant tonight.” Fortunately, she agrees, and we hop in my car and headed home.

Another wave of fear, nausea, and realization drags me out of my random weekend reminiscence. I struggle to think clearly. I close my eyes, take a few deep breaths. Hoping that this was all a dream, I slowly open my eyes, but it is no dream.

The man still lays there in a pool of blood with a chunk of flesh missing from his neck. At the site of what I have done, I feel my cheeks begin to water and I cannot hold down my dinner. I wipe my mouth and begin to hyperventilate.

Warm tears roll down my cheeks as I try to figure out what comes next. Do I call the police? What will I tell them if I do call? He attacked me, so I BIT him?! This is ridiculous. I revisit the idea of this being an awful nightmare. I think about pinching myself before realizing that is absurd. What happened here is real. I am a murderer – and maybe even crazy. I started balling my eyes out. Without thinking, I get into my car and drive straight home. I am panicked and I just feel like I need my best friend. I’m not sure that she can help me with this, but I really just need her.

I smash through the front door of our apartment like a stampede of wild animals. Ana stumbles out of our bedroom, still half asleep.

“What the f**k?” She says before taking in my whole appearance and her already pale skin goes sheet white. “What happened!?”, she yells frantically.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt? What happened?” She starts grabbing at me and checking for wounds.

“I… I killed somebody.” She freezes in shock or maybe fear.

“What?” She repeats herself “What?”

“I don’t know, everything happened so fast”.

She walks past me, closes the front door, grabs my arm, and then leads me to the couch.

“Sit down and tell me what happened,” she says to me in an unnervingly calm voice. My hands are shaking, and my adrenaline is still pumping. I take a deep breath before I began.

“After my shift, I locked up and walked toward my car. When I was fumbling around for my car key, someone came up from behind me and slammed me into my car. I struggled to turn around to find a man.” I tried to continue but started sobbing.

“It is okay,” she says while rubbing my arm in reassurance.

“He held me up against the car and tried to rip open my uniform.” I paused for a long moment.

Ana starts to rub my arm again. I am sure she thinks my silence is because I am upset, but I am afraid to tell her what occurred next. I am afraid to think about what occurred next. I know I can trust her with my life, so I continue.

“I felt a heat wash over me like my blood was scalding. A sensation started to build within me that can only be explained as dark or just deep. It wasn’t as terrible as it sounds though, it felt right. Something unlike anything I have ever experienced before, yet it felt vaguely familiar. I shoved him back with a strength I was unaware I possessed. He smacked the pavement hard enough to knock him out, but that is not even the worst part.” I start sobbing again, but I don’t stop telling her what transpired tonight.

“I just mauled him.”

“What do you mean mauled him?” She asked while still remaining calm. I hesitate before responding.

“I bit him.”

“You bit him?” she asked with a smidge of laughter in her voice.

I shot her a glare. “I didn’t just bite him; I took a chunk out of him” She looked at me and I could tell she was not taking me very seriously.

“I ingested his blood, aggressively, and it almost felt invigorating!” At this point, I was shouting.

We sit there silently just looking at each other for a moment. I wait for her to freak out, to yell, to run in fear, to call me a liar. Nothing.

Finally, she breaks the silence, “What did you do next?”, she asks.

“Nothing, I came here right away. I didn’t know what to do. Do I call the police?”

“No!”, she shouts.

She gets up and walks into the bathroom and I hear the shower come on. When she returns, she tells me to take a shower, scrub myself clean, and that we are going to burn the clothes.

I feel odd about Ana being so calm. Normally, I am the responsible one taking care of her and now she is taking care of me. After my shower, I open the door to let out the steam while I continue brushing my hair and looking at my reflection. I look at my puffy red eyes and the tears still running down my cheeks and wonder how I could be such a monster. I keep trying to justify my actions by thinking about what he might have done to me, but he was already laying on the ground knocked out before I attacked him.

When I come out into the living room, Ana has a fire roaring in the fireplace. She takes the bloody clothes from me and throws them in. I realized she is dressed in all black, which is rare for her. She tosses me one of my black hoodies.

“Where are your car keys?”, she asks while pulling on a pair of boots.

“Where are you going?”, I ask her.

“We cannot just leave that man’s body in the parking lot”, she says while also looking at me like it should be obvious that we are going to move a body.

At that, I start crying again, but not for the reasons I have been crying most of the night, but because I dragged my best friend into a situation where she has to burn clothing and bury bodies. She will be an accessory to a crime that I committed. She could go to prison for this.

“No, I need to take care of this myself. I can’t drag you into this”.

“It is a little late”, she says as she snatches my keys from my hand.

“Come on”. I get up, slide my black DC shoes on, and follow her out the door.

When we arrive, Ana pulls my car around the backside of the building instead of the parking lot out front. I am assuming it is because she doesn’t want my car to be seen. Not that it would be abnormal since I work the night shift here and have most nights for the last few years. We make our way around the side of the building and as we approach the parking lot, I am puzzled. Could I have imagined the whole situation? Maybe I was mistaken about where I parked. I look around the parking lot.

“Where is he”, Ana asks also looking confused.

There is no sign of the man’s body anywhere.

Ana pulls out her phone and starts tapping at her screen. “Who are you calling?” I cannot even tell if I asked out loud or if that question was just a thought. I begin to come up with theories as to why we arrived to find no one here. Maybe somebody found him and called the police? No, the police would still be here. This would be a crime scene. Maybe he wasn’t really dead. Maybe this whole nightmare was all in my head?

Suddenly, I felt lightheaded and overwhelmed. I walked away from Ana, who now had her phone to her ear and was talking to someone, but I had a difficult time focusing and couldn’t hear anything she was saying. I headed toward a nearby parking block to sit down. I began seeing black spots and my legs felt as if they each weighed a hundred pounds. My vision went completely black.