Good for Them by Lexa

Yes, they despised her.

And that would have been quite logical: new in town, from a broken home because her father had gone to another country to buy cigarettes, living in a smaller house than the others, and with a brother who worked for the police. All these factors painted a fairly clear picture of a miserable child, pushed into a corner. One who would take mockery as a blessing from God. 

‘You should be grateful we didn’t throw your phone out of the window!’ shouted one of the lads, hurling the cracked phone into Sharlie’s face. She doesn’t remember his face or his name. To her, each of them looked like a blurred smudge, as if a half-blind person were trying to make out this world. 

It’s just a phone. But no, it was her universe, cracked in two and crushed to dust. The girl’s mum had worked three jobs to buy it for her 17th birthday... so she could be ‘like everyone else’. So that, perhaps for a fleeting moment, the mockery might cease to exist. As was clear, it had all been reduced to nothing, smashed by that idiot’s foot. Beneath that foot, her faith in people was dying once more, screaming in agony. Watching the figures of those boys gradually shrink as they faded into the dark, cloudy sky, the only thing she could hear was the growing, loud laughter. Laughter turning into a scream. A hysterical scream, begging for help. It rings in her head again, squeezing her temples until they ache, forcing the poor girl to curl up on the tarmac. Black eyes, a scream, blood, the forest, and hands. Hands with inhuman skin colour. And that voice. “You’ll be better off. You know why this happened.” 

A white, almost blinding light, and her eyes see the road by the school once more.

Gathering up the shattered pieces of the screen—and cutting her finger badly in the process—Sharlie walked towards her house, her head bowed dejectedly.

One might have thought that this was what her whole life had been like. Colourless, black and white, with bloodstains from a broken nose and bruised knees from all those children who felt it was their duty to hit her. 

But no one knew the real Sharlie. Why those screams haunted her. Why, at night, the only thing she dreamed of was death. 

She spoke to the dead. And not only to them. Every new school, every new town, every new set of friends often ended in a terrible tragedy. A missing boy who’d slipped a spider into her friend’s backpack, a girl who’d torn out a lock of her fiery, curly hair in a fight. They were never found. And they never will be. But she remembers them. By name. And those faces, filled with fear, haunt her in her dreams on those nights when she tries to sleep. They won’t let her sleep. They know she did it. 

Her mother tried with all her might to show Sharlie that she was just a child like any other, especially after her father left. A pile of medication to keep her under control was her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

But money was running out. 

No one knew that Sharlie spoke to the dead. Good for them.