So many people died, some of them strangers from State but some were people I’d seen in the cafeteria, in class, at other fights. I could barely focus on that voice I loved so much describing how afraid he was of losing me, and how he was close to escaping when he ran in the opposite direction, toward me. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to go alone. Told me to leave to get away, anywhere but here. Sitting in Travis’s bedroom, just hours after the fire, my heart raced and my muscles twitched. I’d felt it moments before the fire, and I was feeling it now. My father said that the urgent need to run when things were about to go wrong was a like a tic, a defense mechanism inherent in the Abernathys. The more I tried to ignore it, the more unbearable it became: an itch that needed to be scratched, a scream bubbling to the surface. I could feel it coming: a growing, persistent unease that crept just beneath my skin.
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