She woke up, three months later, underneath that would-be called tree again.

Here was her dress. It felt terrible to be wearing it. The blood wasn’t dry, not at all. Carine wanted to rip it off, but she had nothing to change into and she had no idea where she was. However, she had the distinct impression she was dreaming at that none of this was real. She shut her amber eyes and tried to imagine that she was somewhere else, anywhere else, wearing something nice and fuzzy or sleek or something that was not covered in blood.

Opening her eyes, Carine noted that she had failed miserably. She was still where she had been. She was still wearing this.

“Carine.”

And that voice. She knew that voice. It was the same one she hadn’t recognized before. “What do you want?” she shouted out, wheeling around to try to catch where it was coming from. There had to be a place. Yet there wasn’t any. She chewed at her lower lip. “Leave me alone!”

“I can’t do that.”

She hated to hear that. It made her heart beat faster. This had to do something about prom. She felt it, in the base of her spine. The pain she had felt before she stopped feeling anything from the neck down. She wasn’t dead. Was she? She had lived on from that day. It hadn’t been great, but she was alive.

Carine decided to do something about it.