Her feet carried her, until her skin was too cold to stand the winter winds; the most bitter season in Winthrop's history.
Sometimes Joon saw her brother's hands enclose around hers, gently soothing, only to evaporate into thin air. They tried to tell her to come back, to stay. But she knew they would never look at her the same way. Her father screamed.
Her orange bottle of pills still stood unopened on her counter, as Joon's body floated by the yellow caution tape surrounding the scene of the Winthrop pool. The voices had been calling her to come here, to look at what she'd done.
Joon had been furiously writing to a ghost, blasting David Bowie into her ears, when another invitation arrived at her door. A murder mystery party on the apartment's 7th floor.
She wore a black skirt with a white top, her frizzy red hair tied into a bun with an apron tied around her waist. An alternative waiter with glazed over eyes. Joon assumed she looked presentable, for she didn't own a single mirror. No one could recognize her in the shadowed town of Winthrop.
The 7th floor was dimly lit, people in different costumes roaming. She saw a man with stripped pants and a top hat pass by, his green eyes unblinking. The man was so striking, he seemed to come straight from a freak show. He was shadowed by a similar looking man, with a real live monkey on his shoulder. Purple and blue hallucinations thickened in her mind. Her father screamed.
She saw one little girl at the party, no older than 12, clad in a butler's costume. Wasn't it a school night?
At 9:30 there was ringing in her ears, she saw stars. A sky so overflowed with bright, golden light.
At 9:31 the light went pitch black. Her skin felt tight like rubber.
Joon's brother called out to her. There was a pool of blood. He hands were shaking with crimson. Her father screamed. He told her to stop, to drop it, but she couldn't hear him.
"I'm sorry." She said it. She said it and wrote it again and again. No one was listening.
The lights flickered back on, as did Joon's hearing. A pair of stripped pants lay on the floor, worn by the man with the monkey on his shoulder. There was a pool of blood by his head.
A scream erupted from the room. But it wasn't her father's, it was her own.
