This is it. I'm standing before my house, shivering in the chilly air. I wrap my scarf tighter around my neck, refusing to move.
I can almost picture us here, playing games in the garden or whispering in my bedroom. The loss of her presence is like a gaping hole in the house, incomplete without her. I feel unsteady on my feet, struggling without Freya as my crutch to lean on. All I can think of is that fateful day...
There's a knock at my door and I hurry down the stairs two at a time: Freya is here! She texted me yesterday, asking to come over. We both got phones on the last day of year six so that we can use them for secondary school.
I pause at the door for a split second, hoping it will be ok. She hasn't come over in ages because she made new friends recently. They're more popular, so of course she chooses them over me. It still hurts, though.
Whipping the door open, I see that nobody is there. Where did she go? I walk outside, still in my pink slippers, and peer round the side of the house. Crouched in a bush and accompanied by Mia and Courtney, is Freya. Her face falls when she sees me and she drops her eyes down to the ground. Before Freya has a chance to defend herself, Courtney cuts in, "Oh, sorry, Jess... did you think Freya was going to come to be with..." she scrunches up her nose, "you?"
Mia laughs her sickly sweet laugh, "Oh, as if, Courtney! Why on earth would someone like Freya hang around with that?" She looks at me disdainfully like a piece of dirt caught on her dainty shoe. "What's going on, Freya?" I finally ask. She looks up at me, but she doesn't apologise. Instead she stands up and says, "I don't hang out with losers, Jess, sorry."
This isn't her. It's not. Freya would never do this to me. She wouldn't! I run inside before they see me cry, hot tears spilling onto the muddy ground. I stay huddled in my room for the rest of the day, only coming down for meals so that my parents don't notice that something's wrong. Maybe if I pretend that everything's ok, then it will be. Maybe this was all a dreadful mistake.
*
At a few minutes past five o'clock, there's a timid knock at the door. My mum answers it and feet pad softly up the stairs to my room. Freya bursts in and hugs me, tears streaming down her face. "I'm so sorry, Jess, I don't know why I did it! It wasn't my idea, I swear!"
"Get off of me, you two-faced bitch!" I scream at her, wrenching her off of me. Freya looks startled, but then composes herself. "You know what? Do you want to know why I ditched you? Take a look at yourself, Jess. Take a good look at yourself, then look at Mia and Courtney. You're a right baby in comparison. You're pathetic!" She looks just like them at that moment: her nose wrinkled up like I disgust her, her eyed blazing, her lips fighting back the urge to grin. Freya has turned into the very people she claimed to hate.
*
Shaking my head, I force the thoughts out of my mind before I go too far. I don't want to think about what happened next. How one argument between two friends ended up with one dead on the floor, surrounded by a pool of her own blood.
Fiercely, I wipe my tears away and take a gulp of fresh air. I shouldn't have come - it was stupid of me. As rain starts to fall, I keep my head down low and head back to the bus stop, running away from my fears as I always do. Maybe Freya was right, I am a pathetic, a baby, a loser. And a murderer.