When I came to the next morning, it felt like somebody was trying to drill their way out of my skull.

                  For a few seconds, I just lay there, staring up at the ceiling as my thoughts began to slowly trickle back in. Last night was returning to me in erratic drips: setting off for the warehouse, trying to locate Hannah, the blur in the middle that had somehow resulted in me leaving with Mitchell. And yet against all this, it still felt like there was something missing – a giant piece of the puzzle that was yet to click into place…

                  All of a sudden, it hit me.

                  I shot up in bed, wincing as my head objected to the new upright position. My eyes flickered across the room, landing upon Reese’s bed as my heart rate hit a new high. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting; would I have been more shocked to see her sitting there, or to be faced with the untouched sheets pulled tight over the mattress? Last night’s memory had been tainted with a strange tinge; while too vivid to be a dream, it was way beyond the realm of bizarre reality.

                  It had to be a dream. There could be no other explanation; I wasn’t even going to try to argue with myself that it had existed outside my head. As much as it hurt to think of cold hard facts, Reese was dead, buried six feet under and robbed of her ability to speak or think six weeks ago. She certainly couldn’t appear at the foot of her own bed, talking to me like nothing had happened. It must’ve been a strange side effect of the excessive alcohol and sleep deprivation.

                  There was no other explanation.

                  So why was my heart still pounding a million times too fast?

                  I fought against it, but my head kept wandering back, reinstating how real it had felt at the time. There had been no dreamlike quality about it: no fuzzy haze, or bits of conversation lost to a restless sleep. Everything had been cleanly cut, the words as well-defined as the edges of my sister’s red lipstick.

                  Trembling slightly, I climbed out of bed. My actions were slow and controlled; one wrong move was sure to send my head into an excruciating protest, and my stomach didn’t feel too trustworthy, either. I shuffled across the room, broaching the floor space between the two beds, moving one step at a time as if any sudden jerks could cause Reese to appear out of nowhere.

                  Her bed looked as it had for weeks: too neat to have ever belonged to my sister. In the time she’d actually been sleeping in it, the covers had more often than not been screwed up into a tangled mess. She’d been a firm believer in the ‘I’m only going to mess it up by sleeping in it, so why bother making it?’ worldview, regardless of Mum’s nagging.

                  I stepped closer to the foot of the bed. My eyes scanned the covers, searching for any kind of disturbance, the slightest wrinkle in the sheets that may have provided proof of my own sanity. But there was nothing; everything looked how Mum had left it weeks ago, uncomfortably neat, and certainly never having been disrupted by its previous owner in the middle of the night.

                  I’d been dreaming. The words came with their own relief. I’d been sure, but now I felt like I might be able to start truly believing it. Of course it never happened. I had stumbled across my dark room in an intoxicated state, crashed onto the duvet and fallen asleep right away. That was all.

                  It didn’t happen, and that was the bottom line.

                  I was just going to have to repeat it over and over until the belief became a little more solid. After that, I would be fine.

                  Or so I hoped.

***

                  As the morning turned into the day after, and all the days that followed, I found myself slipping back into normality. Every minute that passed saw me slowly escaping the fear of going out of my mind, leaving me to slot back into my previous schedule with vague success. The further away from Friday night I got, the better things were.

                  And the easier it became to let go of the sight of Reese’s eyes boring into my own.

                  After several days, I was able to wake up in the mornings without a stomach-churning feeling of apprehension, and in the ones that followed that, to open my bedroom door whilst maintaining a vaguely normal heart rate. It had to be progress.

                  I hadn’t been stupid enough to mention it to anybody else. Mum was off-limits on the grounds that she’d have me carted off to a therapist before I could finish my sentence, and that eliminated Brian purely by association. The only real possibility was Archie, but I couldn’t even bring myself to go that far. He might not have manhandled me straight to the school counsellor, but I still wasn’t eager to go blurting it out. We were close, but I wasn’t sure how he’d handle something like that. He seemed content with my half-explanation that I’d come over ill and had to be escorted home by Mitchell, and I was happy to leave it at that.

                  There was really only one person with whom I would’ve shared something of this magnitude. However, it just so happened that not only was she dead, she was also – ironically – the root of the problem.

                  In the absence of any other options, I settled for the next best thing: forgetting the entire thing ever happened. It shouldn’t have been that difficult, but amongst it all, there was one person who seemed to want otherwise.

                  It felt like Mitchell wouldn’t leave me alone. Things were fine at first; it started off with the occasional text or phone call, both of which I ignored. I hoped my silence would serve as a message in itself, but as the days wore on, and the attempts kept coming, he didn’t seem to be getting the picture. The voicemails began piling up in my inbox: short messages, asking if I was okay and could give him a call back. But I still didn’t.

                  He wasn’t even being overly pushy; it was nothing any concerned friend wouldn’t have done. And yet the further he reached out, the more I drew back. I knew what talking to Mitchell would lead to: the question I hadn’t let myself consider. I may have agreed to let him help with the bucket list, but that had been before I started questioning my sanity. Things were different now, and thinking about the list – let alone making any sort of move towards completing the next item – felt like going back on myself, slipping back into the foolish belief that my encounter with Reese had actually happened.

                  To carry on as normal, I had to put it all out of my mind, fake a smile and get on with it.

                  And maybe I’d have been able to do that, if it hadn’t been for him.

                  I hoped it would end with the phone calls, but that turned out to be too much to ask for. Two weeks later, he went further, starting to try catching me in person. It mostly happened in the corridors between lessons, the occasions when I was most likely to be without Archie. The majority of the time, I saw it coming. He was too obvious, and I was on the lookout; each time I caught sight of him, or heard my name being called out from behind, I made a quick getaway.

                  It worked for a few days, at which point I began to relax. Then, a week or so later, I found him waiting outside the door of the chemistry lab when the lesson finished.

                  “Callie.”

                  I looked around frantically for my exit. And yet as the rest of my classmates piled out, blocking the path to any of the other corridors, I realised he had me cornered. This time, there was no getting away.

                  Swallowing, I turned to face him, though I didn’t let our gazes meet. “Hey.”

                  I could tell he was staring right at me, looking with such intent I was already on edge. I kept my gaze towards the floor, only the tips of his shoes in my line of vision. “How are you doing?” he asked.

                  It was such a casual question, something anybody would’ve asked, and yet with Mitchell it seemed to be requesting so much more. I chewed on my lip, rubbing the skin over and over until I could feel it becoming sore. “I’m okay.”

                  He didn’t believe me – he never did – but nodded anyway. “Good.”

                  “I’ve been busy,” I found myself saying, before I could stop the words coming out.

                  “What?”

                  “That’s what you’re going to ask, isn’t it?” I said, wondering why I was still talking. Minimal answers would’ve done fine, and yet here I was, ruining things. “You probably think I’ve been avoiding you. But I haven’t. I’ve just been busy.”

                  “Well,” he said, “that’s not what I was thinking. But you may have just put the idea in my head.”

                  I winced. “Oh.”

                  “You know,” he went on, “if I’ve suddenly developed really bad BO, or something, and that’s why you’re avoiding me, you should probably tell me. I’m going to the supermarket later, so I can pick up some more deodorant. And it’ll be less awkward in the long run.”

                  I managed a weak smile. “No, you’re fine.”

                  “You’re sure?”

                  “Yeah,” I said. “We must’ve just missed each other.”

                  “Still.” He remained as composed as ever, like nothing could faze him. “We’re here now, aren’t we? Avoiding me or not, we’re having this conversation right now.”

                  I couldn’t help thinking about how mildly odd he was. Most of the things he came out with would’ve been out of place on anybody else, not least his startlingly honest nature, and yet with him it somehow passed off as normal.

                  “Yeah,” I began, unsure of how else I was supposed to respond. “I guess we are.”

                  “I just wanted to check up with you. See how things are going. We haven’t spoken in a while, and I was thinking maybe we should get cracking on that list… You did say you wanted help, after all.”

                  I knew it was coming, and yet my heart still did a strange little leap. I had been trying so hard to push all thoughts of the list – and Reese – out of my head that the mention of it now came as a jolt. Thinking of it meant revisiting that night, and with that, I couldn’t guarantee my sanity for long. Maybe it was just me, but I preferred making it through the day without having to question my mental state.

                  “Unless, of course, you’ve had a change of heart. Or have you managed to do the whole thing by yourself in two weeks? That would be impressive.”

                  “No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I haven’t done it.”

                  “Okay. So the offer still stands, then?” The inflection suggested a question, but he carried on talking without waiting for an answer. “We should probably get a move on; we’ve been slacking for a whole fortnight. What else is on there we could have a stab at?”

                  “No.”

                  Mitchell raised an eyebrow. “No?”

                  Somewhere in the conversation, my eyes had dared to creep up and meet his, but now they flickered back down to the floor. I couldn’t deal with his intent stare, looking right into me. “I’m not doing that anymore,” I said. “The list, I mean. Thanks for the offer, but… well, the help really isn’t necessary anymore.”

                  I made to scoot past him, to escape as quickly as possible, but he placed a hand on my arm. “Hey, hold on.”

                  There was something about his tone – maybe the strangely gentle note – that stopped me from making a break for it. As much as I thought I wanted to, my feet had frozen in position, as if there was glue between my soles and the carpet. “What do you mean, you’re not doing it anymore? Are you giving up?”

                  I hadn’t even allowed myself to think it – mostly because my mind had slipped into the habit of shutting down each time it dared to wander there – but Mitchell’s words felt like confirmation. “Yeah,” I said, still avoiding eye contact. “I am. Sorry.”

                  “Why?” he asked, genuinely curious. “You seemed so certain of it before… I thought it was what Reese would’ve wanted. What made you decide that?”

                  “Mitchell,” I said in a low tone, hoping this would put up a barrier between us. There hadn’t been enough of them lately. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

                  Still, it wasn’t exactly going to go to plan if he was involved, and I should’ve known that.

                  “Callie,” he began, and against my instinct, I found myself looking up. “Is something going on? Are you okay?”

                  There it was again: his insistence on sharing, as if that would solve everybody’s problems. As if telling him that I’d had a conversation with my dead sister just two weeks beforehand would make the situation better, and not just earn me a one-way ticket to a mentally unstable label. I kind of wanted to shout at him, if only to make him realise that talking wasn’t the answer to everything, but doing so would’ve only proved his point.

                  “I’m fine,” I lied, once again. “I just don’t want to do the list anymore. I’m sure Reese would understand.”

                  She wouldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t. She’d as good as told me herself, but I was trying not to dwell on that. Dream or not, Reese wouldn’t have let me give up that easily, and yet here I was, doing it anyway. I couldn’t work out whether to feel ashamed or relieved.

                  “I thought this was something you wanted to do.” Mitchell had a strange look on his face: one I couldn’t quite work out. Then again, it wasn’t like that was new to me. “Did something happen?”

                  “Nothing,” I told him, too quickly. “Nothing happened. I just changed my mind.”

                  “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

                  That’s the last thing I want, I wanted to say. Talking with Mitchell was entering the unknown; I couldn’t be sure where it would end up. And in my current frame of mind, where each thought had to be carefully screened for sanity’s sake, I didn’t want to put myself at any risk of pouring my heart out. As always, it was just easier to keep quiet.

                  “I’m fine,” I said.

                  “What’s really stopping you, Callie?”

                  He was looking right at me, our eyes locked in a way that became increasingly unnerving over time. His hair, still too long, was threatening to flop right over his eyes, but I was too distracted for it to bother me. I swallowed, unsure of what to say.

                  Suddenly, all I could hear was Reese’s voice, loud and clear within the confines of my head: I’m counting on you for this, okay? Though I was still desperately trying to convince myself the words were the product of my own imagination, they held more truth than I liked to consider. I knew my sister well enough to know what she’d expect of me, even if she was no longer around. And had our positions been reversed, had I been the one with the shitty heart and a life cut short, Reese wouldn’t have even hesitated to do what she had to do. She never would’ve given up, let alone without a fight.

                  “Me,” I murmured, the word barely audible. “I’m what’s stopping me. I’m scared.”

                  “I know.” It wasn’t what I’d been expecting to hear. How was it possible that every word out of his mouth sounded like it was backed up by years of wisdom? Was he just that articulate, or was he hiding more than I’d ever assumed him capable of? “It would be a lot stranger for you not to feel terrified.”

                  “What if I don’t make it?”

                  “Then you tried.”

                  “Reese would’ve done it.”

                  “And you’re not Reese,” Mitchell told me. It was such a simple truth, something I thought I knew for myself, and yet the words managed to sound different coming from him. “You’re Callie, and that’s enough.”

                  But they were just words. There was a whole other stretch involved in believing them, rather than just hearing. It was something I’d always struggled with. The notion of being second best to my twin sister had been ingrained for as long as I could remember, even if only by myself, and it wasn’t easy to shake off. I wasn’t sure I’d ever fully adjust to life without her – nor did I want to – but there was still progress to be made. At least now I felt vaguely aware of the direction.

                  I wasn’t sure of the point at which I’d decided, but I had anyway.

                  “I want to do it,” I said, after a long pause.

                  Mitchell’s eyes studied my expression, as deeply as ever, but this time I held my gaze. “You do?”

                  My fingers, though trembling slightly, found their way to my back pocket. When I pulled the list out, it was already half-unfolded, the item I had in mind on show. “I know what’s next,” I said, even though I hadn’t been fully aware of it before. “This one.”

                  The list exchanged hands, and his gaze flickered downward, following the indication of my finger.

                  Number six: stay out all night.

                  When he lifted his head again, our eyes met above the paper, and a twitch of a smile could be seen at the corner of his lip. “You got it, boss,” he said, in a mildly amused tone.

                  “What’ve you got on for tonight?” I wasn’t sure what had come over me, but I was suddenly determined, itching to get restarted on what I’d been putting off for too long. It was almost like I was being spurred on by another presence, my own inclination of what Reese would’ve felt, the desire to make her proud.

                  As the twin who’d spent so long living in her shadow, I was finally going to break out. And she had to appreciate it.

                  “As of now, you,” Mitchell said, with a small smile. “Pick you up at midnight?”

                  It was me that said it, but for how foreign the words sounded on my tongue, it might as well have been Reese. “Yeah.” A twitch in the corner of my lip, and I found a smile threatening to show. “Midnight it is.”

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Hi, guys! Sorry for the slight wait; I was having a bit of trouble with this chapter. I went through a couple of weeks of strange writer's block, and I'm not sure whether it's over or not. I really hope so. It also doesn't help that uni makes me ridiculously busy, but term ends in less than a week, and once I'm home, I should have a lot more time to write.

What are your opinions on Mitchell? I'm intrigued, as he's turning out to be quite a strange character to write, and I'm not sure how this is coming across to a reader.

Anyway, until next time! Love you guys :)