"Don't tell your mother," said Dad, dropping one bottle of alcohol on the floor.

Instead of asking why I was curled up on the floor as a sobbing mess, he valued my mother's limited knowledge over my state. I sat up and rubbed my eyes to get rid of the last trace of tears and glared at his presence. His tufty black hair was bedraggled, his clothes covered in snow specks and eyes clouded with whatever hundred drinks he previously drank.

I squinted at him. "Did you drive here?" I cringed inwardly at my weak and ugly voice.

My father released a short and unpleasant laugh. "I'm not stupid, sweetheart. I asked one of my pals to drop me off. Nice guy, he is." Finally, he looked me in the eye and asked, "What's going on here? Have you been crying?"

"I-I..." I looked away. If I told him that I had been hallucinating my brother he would've sent me to the first mental hospital down the road. "I just remembered Will."

"Will," Dad's eyes sunk even further into his sockets. His crestfallen tone made me regret what I had said immediately. Suddenly rage flashed into those eyes. "Will!"

I squealed as he threw the half-filled bottle of gin across the room. It crashed against the wall behind the dining table, bouncing onto the wood floor.

"My son," Dad muttered furiously, beginning to pace around the room, almost staggering onto the ground. "He left me. He ditched me in this shithole."

I wanted to stop him but his anger acted like a shield. I felt like if I walked up to him in that moment he would've swatted me away like a fly. "Please, Dad, you don't mean that."

He ignored me. "I can't deal with it anymore, Sarah. On top of all of this, your mother has been acting suspiciously. It's a shame that this woman has my child inside her. If the slightest thing goes wrong on on my end she'll have something to blame me for -" Dad pointed at the broken glass bottle, "- and she'll go bat-shit crazy. That's what this pregnancy does to her."

Even though I knew it was the alcohol speaking, I felt relieved when he halted mid-step and looked up at one of our family pictures that hung on a mantelpiece. He went quiet and slowly walked up to the picture. He walked so camly and carefully that I forget about how drunk he was.

At first, I thought that he was simply admiring the picture for a bit too long until I realized that he was absurdly stroking a figure in the photo. William.

I rose to my feet and made my way towards my father. I reached out to touch him and laced my fingers around his sweaty palm.

Hurt flooded through me once he jerked away from me as if I truly had slapped him. Dad stepped away from the picture and me, shaking his head in distress. "I think I need to... rest."

He brushed against my shoulder when he walked past me and marched methodically up the stairs. He stumbled twice and almost face-planted, but got up willfully every time. Just before he disappeared up the staircase I heard him calling my name. "Sarah?"

His voice was thick was sadness. Hope sparked up in me. There was a slight chance that he had something to say to me, something comforting that I wanted to hear. But all he said was, "Don't tell Mom." He paused then added, "please. Oh, and it would be great if you could clean up the glass."

I watched in disdain as he continued his robotic walk up to his bedroom. I didn't want to blame him for his selfishness, but I did. It wasn't fair for any of us. Including my mother, who never slept around with anyone, which my father accused her of. That lead me to question: where was she? She couldn't exactly go anywhere in the city, not while carrying her seven-month-old baby.

I spent the next half hour wallowing in my thoughts and cleaning up the remnants of glass. I also had to take care of the wasted broken plates, which was my fault. I was careful at first of cutting myself, but towards the middle and end, I decided not to care.

* * *

I didn't have anything to occupy myself with for the rest of the afternoon. I felt so empty that my best shot of thinking about anything but Will was to study and catch up with homework. I padded up to my room, past my dad's quiet one and ripped my bag open. I dragged out my Physics textbook and began to read all the facts until my eyes blurred. I had swept my eyes past five pages and no information had sunk into my brain.

I snapped it shut and allowed my gaze to linger on my laptop. I could've done lots of things to avoid hallucinations again on that thing - check out psychologists, Google ways to avoid panic attacks, how to control anxiety, whatever. Instead, I stood up and took myself to Will's room.

His immaculate white door was shut. Feeling like an intruder, I delicately twisted the knob and pushed it open. I readied myself for another false Will jump-scare, but the room was quiet and normal.

The air felt ominous and tight. I ignored the paranoia and scanned the room again. His single blue and white striped bed was lurking in the corner as per usual. His stack of trophies was standing proudly atop of his bookshelf, in order of date and category. The distilled bedside lamp was silently brooding, and his laptop was lying on his bed.

It was slightly messy ever since the police checked his room for clues. They hadn't found anything abnormal. Nothing was missing. Mom had hurriedly put everything back in place after they had left as if cleaning it would bring William back.

I gazed at his book collection. He had always liked the classics of the olden times - especially Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery. If that wasn't enough to boost his strange disappearance, the fact that he always added notes to those puzzled me.

I took one book out of the shelf. It was called 'Stand By Me,' written by V.F Garden. The cover was dark and eerie looking, with a random white silhouette of a detective under the standard title. I sat down on his bed and opened it to the first page. It was ordinary looking, with Will's handwriting on top of the credits saying, 'property of Will Black.' I almost rolled my eyes.

The next few pages were normal. The English was very old-fashioned and difficult. From what I had understood, it was a story of a father who felt cursed with a blind son. His son was around six or seven years old, obedient and quiet yet detested by his father.

I was soon attached to the story and spent another hour racing through the quizzical words. I noticed a few notes written on the sides of the paragraphs in Will's handwriting, but each one was the definitions of really unusual words.

The next chapters spoke about how the poor blind boy's body was found dead. I automatically knew how obvious the murderer was - the father, of course - but the evidence that the main detective found proved me wrong.

My heart slowed when I saw a note next to a sentence. A sentence similar to what he said today when he was lunging my face towards the window. It wasn't a definition.

I read the sentence again: We see through the glass. This glass directly abrogates us, like shrapnel through our skin, convivial with the blind, dearth with the wise.

On top of this sentence, he wrote: Sarah.

It shouldn't have meant anything serious, not to anyone who wasn't 'Sarah'. But this told me something more than what he thought of his sister - my hallucination had come from something more than just a wild imagination.