I mean, it probably didn’t help that we were out so late, but the WIFI’s shot at our place, and my sister is trying to take senior year seriously. We were at the library. Before that, this girl had been shrieking her head off about the work she has to get done before tomorrow. IDK. She shoulda just gone after school, but I had a bit to do as well, so I vouched for her. Our little brother joined in. They made us beg for it. Once we got there, we unpacked, quickly did our thing. Justin was there too—that tryhard who gets 1st in every subject on Earth. My siblings talk about him all the time. You don’t know him. It’s not important. We had been talking about him on the way to the train station, Maybe he has no life, and all that shit. It was almost 8:00, and that guy was still in his uniform. Anyway. We stopped talking and looked up. Above us, the sky was black and cloudless. You know that strip of street shops lining the path to the park, near the station? Every few steps the lights fade out, looking like little yellow gates from where the light hits the wooden beam and follows it to the ground. That’s how I remember it, anyway. In one of these gaps of darkness, the path branched right to an unlit alley. After we stopped talking about Justin, we talked about the dark sky. There were three of us, and we’re short for our ages. Only one of us could fight. Two of us could run. We were unsure how many could scream. We’d heard a few years ago someone had been attacked at the station, and it was my brother who started saying shit like, Imagine if someone started following us. Imagine a tall faceless man just around the corner. In the space where one shop ended and another began, something moved. That’s when we started booking it. To be honest, I didn’t see what it was, but I didn’t need to. The movement was contagious. You know how it is when you can’t recognise anything. You start running. I had been lagging behind, my legs unstretched and weak, watching my siblings hit the ground further and further from me. I grew less concerned about whatever was behind my back when my brother started flying forward. His converse caught some botched brick-laying work. I realised no one was even following us. He’d started yelling and cursing in the middle of the street, talking big for a year 9, but on the bus ride home I could hear him whimpering. Our mom saw the blood on his face later on and couldn’t speak to my sister and I for a week.