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Teenage Ghost
Rhonda awoke in her mother’s bed surrounded by all her mother’s things. The entire house was silent, and for a moment she had forgotten she wasn’t still seventeen years old.
For just moments between sleep and wake, she was herself again. Laying in her mother’s bed, waking up from an after school nap. It was her favorite way of comforting herself from a hard day at school, or failing her science exam.
She would lay here like she did as a child, when her mother still cradled her in her arms. She would pretend her mother was still there cradling her, hugging her tight. Assuring her that everything was going to be okay, eventually. She laid here now waiting for her mother to come from home from work and find her laying there. She would crawl into bed and make everything alright again.
Then Rhonda took a deep breath and reality removed the sleepy film from her brain. She remembered where she was, and what was going on.
She got out of bed and walked down the hallway to Jeff’s room.
The room was nothing but four walls and carpet. There was no bed, or furniture of any kind left in it. When she checked the closet there were no clothes hanging there, not even any vacant hangers.
It was as if he had never been there at all.
Rhonda felt a pang of sadness, and fought back the urge to let a tear fall. She drew in a deep breath and walked out of the room.
She walked to the kitchen and sat down at the table. She glanced over all the counter tops but saw no evidence that her medications had returned. Maybe she was wrong about the boy, maybe the medications had messed her up some with side effects.
What if one of the side effects was doing things while blacked out, like sleepwalking. You hear about it all the time, people do these strange things and are completely unaware all because of a side effect to some medication they were taking. It was obvious she was having hallucinations from them, because the shaker went straight through the boy.
It was always anti-depressant medications that were guilty of it too, and how many of those was she taking? Rhonda shook her head, she had been taking too many.
She had probably thrown out her own pills, and never even known she did it. Then she blamed Jeff for everything, and none of it was his fault. Everything else she thought was wrong with him was probably imagined too. Paranoia is also a common side effect of all these pills.
Rhonda looked around again at the empty kitchen. There would be no one to comfort her now. And she’d chased away the only other person in this whole world who seemed to care about her.
Why was she always doing this to herself?