Chapter One

What should have been another normal day in my fifteen years of living, turned out to be the day my human life ended- or should I say, Quentin Decimal’s life ended. I don’t even know who or what I am exactly anymore. Just that, the ‘me’ back then is no longer the ‘me’ now and that this world, is a completely different world from the one I lived in back then.

I should have been on my way home from another hellish day at school and the only thing awaiting me as I turned the corner towards the building that I so ironically called “home” is another day of torture and abuse. That has been my ‘normal’ for the past eight years of my life. Ever since my mother died at the tragic car accident my father has been incessantly reminding and blaming me that it was my fault she was dead, life took a turn to the absolute worst.

Back in my childhood, I was happy. My family was like any other normal American family. We celebrated Christmas with my other relatives, my dad took my mom out on dates to celebrate their yearly anniversaries, my only worries back then were if I could go out with my friends to play videogames.

But the sudden death of my mom changed everything.

I still remember it up until now, even when I’m in a completely different world I can still hear the very life inside of her escaping with each of her short breaths. I can still see it- the way a black sedan came cruising out from seemingly nowhere and crashing into our car. How my mom reached out and protected me as she saw the outlines of the car making its way towards ours. How the next moments became a blur of color and then a sudden blackness washed over me. I remember fading in and out of consciousness- blurred faces, muted shouting, doctors and nurses whispering were some of the only things I could remember during the hours after the accident.

When I came to, everything was finished. She was dead.

The weeks after that became a blur.

With the absence of mom, everything changed inside the house.

I became a recluse, spending hours on end locked away in my room playing videogames to fill the hole in my heart where she had once been. My dad became a drunkard, losing his job in the local construction company; drinking day in and day out with no end; throwing fits of anger during the occasional moments when he’s sober.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Without a job and with his new-found drinking addiction, my dad became a useless excuse of a parent. We slowly emptied the family bank account all these years to pay for our expenses. It’s a wonder how we could have survived until today.

My relationship with dad, however, completely turned to the worse after mom’s death. During the occasional moments when he wasn’t drunk, he was having constant outbursts which were almost always directed towards me. His outbursts and abuse soon became a regular thing in our household.

The verbal abuse I learned to cope with through the years, the physical part of the abuse, however, was the one I learned to fear. I locked myself away in my room most of the time, making sure the door was locked before I could relax and calm down. The times when he caught me outside of my room were the one of the many times when I wished I was the one rotting away a hundred feet beneath the world rather than my mom.

When the school year started, I became cold and distant to everyone and slowly, friends just started disappearing. I constantly had to hide the scars and injuries I gained from dad’s abuse, ostracizing the people around me with my paranoid attitude. In short, I became a loner. That’s when the jokes and bullying started. Muffled whispers about the weirdo kid with the dead mom and the drunkard dad, the loner mommy’s boy who’s still mourning a death from eight years ago.

Verbal abuse gradually turned into physical assault. With my lanky and scrawny physique, I was the perfect candidate to bullies. Being totally apathetic and indifferent to the bullying didn’t help either. I became used to being used by others, my money being taken by kids twice my size, my books being thrown around like nobody’s business.

The teachers and staff tried to help me, but even they were completely helpless when the jocks and queen bees ruled the school population with an iron fist. Who they deemed bullied, remained as bullied and I was one of the main targets of these so-called kings and queens.

Our family soon became the joke of the entire town. The once perfect Decimals family now reduced to an empty shell all because of the death of one Sarah Decimals.

That was my life back on Earth. But now, now I don’t even know what I am or where I am.

I try remembering what happened while I was making my way home, but only a pounding headache assaulted me with what I assumed were hazy glimpses of a memory that was quickly fading away from my mind.

Right now, only sheer unending darkness stretching into seeming infinity covered my vision. My senses were entirely numb—forcing me to focus on the black horizon, forcing me to float on the black unknown supposedly devoid of all signs of life. But somehow, instinctively, I knew I was alive. I am still alive.

My head is blank. I do not know what is happening to me, but what I do know, is that if this is a second chance in life, or afterlife, never again will I let myself go through everything I’ve suffered through a second time. Never again.