I live in a loop.

Every day, I get out of bed at 7:38AM, slip on some clothes, wake up Kennedy and make my way downstairs, where I scoop up three handfuls of cheerios and drop them into a bowl. Once I'm finished eating breakfast, I climb back up the stairs and make my way into the washroom where I brush my teeth for a full two minutes and gel my hair. Then I pack my school bag and check four times to make sure everything's in there, and once more just for luck. I leave the house at 8:04 AM to walk nine minutes to my bus stop. On my way there, I usually pass by Ms. Andrews, an elderly woman who sits outside every morning to greet an abandoned cat she named Peanut. I don't like Peanut. I don't like animals much in general.

At school, I push through the day, counting down the hours and the minutes I have until class is over. I erase pencil markings and rewrite sentences because the handwriting was messy, or unclear, or was going to bring me bad luck, or somehow I'll find a reason. After a day at school, I take the bus and walk for another nine minutes, past the playground and the stream and the alleys and the buildings. I make it into my neighbourhood and make sure to step over the cracks on the sidewalk.

When I get home, I watch TV for a good thirty minutes, and then I do my homework, which involves more erasing and more rewriting. I study as much as I can, until Mom and Dad tell me that it's enough. It's never enough, though. It's never enough because at some point in the evening my routine will mess up, and somehow I'll feel unprepared and too unlucky to stop doing my task. I'm afraid of the future, and even if Dr. Evans instructs me to control my actions and tell myself that I'm being irrational I can't. It's not that easy. I wish it was.

I see Dr. Evans every Tuesday at exactly 5 o'clock. I used to think that I'd be cured by now - that the obsessions and intrusive thoughts and the flashes of false scenarios would go away. They've only gotten worse.

I get these flashes - these images that just pop into my head. I can't control them. They're gory. They're traumatizing. I watched a video the other day. It was a short horror film, and I don't know why I watched it, but I did, and the girl in the video was just about Kennedy's age. She got stabbed in the stomach multiple times and then started puking blood everywhere, and then she collapsed and fell face-forward, and when the guy she was with flipped her body over her eyes were gone. I can't stop thinking about it. Now, I think about it happening to just about every girl I run into. I hate it. I told Dr. Evans about it. She didn't make it go away.

Dr. Evans told me to try writing down my thoughts. That's what I'm doing now. I'm writing this down, scribbling and scribbling and scribbling and scribbling everything down in my journal, writing certain words four times because she says it might make me feel a little better. I hope it does. I'd like to think that by the end of this I'll be okay. I'll be cured.

I can't stop thinking about Cole, and Sadie, and even Felicity. I can't stop remembering everything Sadie had told me. I can't stop asking myself questions about Cole. I'm scared. I'm scared because I don't know how to control anything anymore. Dr. Evans told me to write about them, too, and so that's what I'm doing now. I'm writing and writing and writing and writing in the slightest sliver of hope that the memories will go away - just disappear, never to be thought of again, because I don't know what to believe anymore. I don't know what to believe, and I don't know how to get rid of anything.

So I'm writing.

╳

Cole had been my best friend and next door neighbour for two years before everything happened. In fact, he had been my only friend for a very, very long time. We did everything together, like: ride our bikes to school, explore the forest in our backyard, collect frogs, play hockey, and the list goes on. Everything.

But there was something wrong - you could tell when you looked at him closely. The thing about Cole was, when you took the time to observe him carefully, you could see this emptiness in his eyes - some sort of dullness, I guess you could say. He never really spoke to me about it. Cole was a very sarcastic, witty kind of guy, and he didn't like expressing himself in any other way. I knew one thing, though: I knew that he was getting hurt at home. I could tell because Cole would come to school with the occasional black eye, and in the evenings I could hear shouts and yells and curses muffled as they traveled through the walls of my home.

One day, I stepped out of the house to take my dog on a walk around the neighbourhood. Ruffles was an old Labrador, with short blond hair that grew completely white around his nose and over his droopy, tired eyes. I was walking, past the playground and Ms. Andrews' house and the stream, but when I got to the stream, I saw the figure of a boy sitting on the grass at the ledge of the water, staring into it, so close he could fall in if the slightest gust of wind allowed him to. When I got closer I realized it was Cole, crouched over the stream with the hood on his winter jacket hovering over his face. For a second I just stopped in my tracks and watched him, wondering what he was doing there, and then I saw him lean a little forward, and I was afraid he'd fall in. "Cole!" I shouted. "What are you doing?"

He flinched, shying away from the stream and falling backwards, his hood flying away from his face and revealing his frightened eyes and bloody nose. He had a new bruise. It was pink and purple and blue, stretching from the corner of his eye down to his cheekbone. His hands were shaking, too. One of them held a Kleenex, dotted with blood and tears. The other flew to his face, his fingers pressing up against his bruise in a poor attempt at covering it up. "Caleb?" he said. "What are you doing here?"

I observed him for a second, processing the situation. Ruffles stuck close to me, which was odd, because usually Ruffles was the kind of dog to inch closer to strangers and sniff them. Now, we both just stared at Cole, who seemed afraid and embarrassed. "Well?" he said. "What do you want?"

I moved closer to him, extending my hand. He took it, standing up and dusting himself off, avoiding eye-contact with me. "You good?" I asked. "What happened?"

Cole still couldn't look at me. He didn't answer.

He just bit his lip and began to cry.

I stood there, unsure of what to do. I had never seen Cole cry, ever. Cole was the kind of guy who'd just laugh and crack jokes all of the time and insult you. Now, though, he was so vulnerable I thought he'd break down and crumple up if I did so much as ask him another question. It was odd to see him like this, and I didn't really know what to do.

So I just let him cry, and he cried for a while. He sat back down, and I sat with him, and for a while we just sat in silence. Finally, he sucked in a deep breath and started to talk. He didn't tell me what had happened. Instead, he spoke about Sadie.

I had never met Sadie, but Cole spoke about her all of the time. He'd known her since they were kids. He showed me a picture of her, once. She looked about eight or nine, and she was standing next to little eight-or-nine-year-old Cole, and they were grinning with their eyes crinkled and twinkling, with ice cream cones held firmly between their hands. Her hair was wavy and long, and her eyes were hidden behind the lenses of glasses that were way too big for her face. Cole looked happy. She did, too.

I also had a girl I liked to talk to. Well, that's not true. I didn't really talk to her. When I approached her I became all awkward and insecure, which was typical of me and how I acted around everyone, but especially in front of her.

Her name was Felicity, and she was an artist. Felicity liked to read and draw on her free time, and she was always participating in extracurricular activities and school plays. Often times I'd look at her in class and catch her with her agenda open and a gel pen in between her fingers, doodling sketches or writing song lyrics or poems. Some days I heard her hum to herself quietly, and at the end of the day she'd laugh with her friends all the way to her locker. She was elegant and graceful, and her long hair swayed behind her when she walked, and she always wore this really bright smile that made you feel like you meant something to her.

Once Cole was done crying and talking about Sadie, he took a deep breath and revealed something I wished he hadn't. He told me he wanted to run away.

I just stared at him for a minute, eyes wide. It was the craziest thing I'd ever heard him say. "Run away?" I said. "Where?"

He just shrugged and lifted his arms, then let them fall to his sides. "I don't know, Caleb! Somewhere! Anywhere but here."

Pause. Silence.

"Maybe..." he trailed off for a second. "Maybe I'll go to like, Quebec or something."

Now he was sounding really crazy. "Are you out of your mind? How are you going to get to Quebec?"

"It's not that far."

"Why on earth would you want to go to Quebec? So you can try poutine and learn French? It's really not that great, definitely not worth ditching your best friend and everything you have."

He sighed. "You're right. I don't know what I'm saying."

"Good," I said. "I know I'm right."

He looked up at me, sniffled, and then smiled to himself. "Poutine does sound good, though. I mean, it's a heart-attack in a bowl, but Sadie says Quebec's poutine is waaaayyyy better than any other province's interpretation of it."

"I'm sure it is."

"The only French word I know is baguette."

"What about croissant?"

"Oh, so we're naming French breads, then? Alright. Brioche! Beat that."

"Uh," I hesitated. "Ciabatta?"

"That's Italian." He smiled crookedly at me, tear-stained cheeks and all.

"Darn."

"I win."

"I... Lose?"

"Damn right you do. I'm all set for Quebec, I guess."

"You sure are."

"You down to come with me?"

"Totally."

"Let's do it."

"Yeah."

"We could own our own bakery and make baguettes."

"And croissants."

"And brioches."

"And ciabatta bread."

"Sill Italian."

"So what?"

"We're going to Quebec! Not Italy."

"It's not exactly France either."

"Hm, guess so. So that's it? We're moving to Quebec?"

"Yep."

"You'll finally get to meet Sadie."

"She's from Quebec?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, but then you have to let me drag along Felicity."

"Sure thing."

"Sounds good. So we're all set?"

And then he started to laugh, and his laugh was so contagious that I started to laugh, too. And so we laughed and laughed and laughed, doubling over with our shoulders shaking, and we started to laugh even harder for no apparent reason. I was just happy that he hadn't fallen into the stream and hurt himself, I guess. I was just happy that I had been able to make him happy, momentarily. After a while, though, I could see in his eyes that something was wrong, because his laugh got softer and his smile faded a little, and he almost looked like he was in pain again. He still had the Kleenex dotted with blood in tears balled up in his hand. After he stopped laughing, he breathed out a sigh and he rolled it up, chucking it into the stream.

"That's littering," I said.

"I know." He shot me a grin, but it was more of a tight-lipped smile.

We were quiet for a while, and we watched the Kleenex dissolve into the water until it turned into a ball of mush, floating down and down and down and down further into the stream until we lost sight of it.

Cole accompanied me later while I continued to walk Ruffles around the neighbourhood, and on the way back he went home, feeling a little better. I watched him go inside and waved at him, shouting, "See you tomorrow!"

He just smiled at me and shut the door behind him, and I went home, too. But the thing was, I didn't see Cole the next day.

Cole went missing after that.

a/n: so I just remembered I was supposed to publish this about a million years ago so here it is finally! I've also discovered more chapters written :o So yeah, expect some updates!