Prologue
They found me in the forest shortly after dawn. I was not far from the tree line, on the side of the gravel road half a mile away from my house. The branches had scratched deep red lines into my face and arms, and the rocks had battered and bruised my limbs until they were black and blue. My torn clothes were a rusty scarlet, sticky with half-dried blood that wasn’t only my own. That morning, the sky burned red.
First came the questions: rapid streams of who, what, why? for which I had no answers. They handed me a bottle of water and wrapped a thin blanket around my shoulders, which did nothing to stave off the chill that seemed to have settled in my bones. A couple of paramedics checked me over, and one police officer asked me questions while another called my parents. My mom and dad were nearly hysterical when they arrived - apparently, I had been missing for no less than fourteen hours, having disappeared at some point on the walk home.
The paramedics found several deep lacerations across my upper back, as if someone had gone at me with a knife. That’s what friends and neighbors suggested had happened, once the news had spread across town like wildfire. Others thought I had tried to run away from home, but was lost and injured by the unpredictable forest terrain. Either way, I could neither confirm nor deny their suspicions - I couldn’t remember anything. The police told me afterwards that I hadn’t been alone when I initially went missing the night before, that I had last been seen with Jamie and Mia, my classmates and closest friends. The questions continued in a secure room at the local police station, but I proved little use. I didn’t know why I was in the forest. I had no recollection of entering, nor any idea what had happened that night behind the dense treeline. I tried hard to remember - particularly after the police search of the forest turned up no traces of Mia and Jamie - but nothing came. The night was nothing but an empty black void in my memory.
Next came the guilt. Two of my closest friends were missing, and I couldn’t sort out my own head enough to help the police look for them. I had to know something, even if I had only gotten the slightest glimpse of what had happened to them. In the days and weeks that followed, they were all I thought about. I felt their absence everywhere I went, and I couldn’t understand why it was that I had walked out of that forest and they didn’t. Dr Martin, my high school therapist, surmised that I was likely suffering from some kind of trauma-related amnesia, but I didn’t care. I wanted - no, I needed - to remember. I never once stopped to consider that there might have been a very good reason I didn’t.
