I Am Not A Robot

[SOTF_Help]

((Madison Springer continued from Re-Do, Round Two))

She’d stopped humming. She kept trying to pick up the tune again, but it evaded her. “This Little Light of Mine” had gone out.

Madison stumbled through the brush, because that was how she was now, a thing of the forest. She wasn’t human. Not like the rest of them. Not anymore. Maybe she never had been, really, and that was why she’d always wondered whether anyone really wanted her and had been secretly sure that they didn’t.

She’d wandered in circles for days, and she hadn’t died yet. Nobody wanted to kill her, even for what she’d done to Nathan. It was like Madison’s existence had been blocked from everyone else’s notice, even if she hadn’t spent all her time creeping around and trying not to be seen. Maybe she could walk right up behind someone and shoot them, and they’d never see her coming. Maybe she’d try, she told herself, and it sounded like the kind of thing you told yourself when you knew that you wouldn’t do it.

Madison didn’t know, though. She’d done things she didn’t mean before. She’d done things and meant to do them, because it felt like protecting herself when she was hurt.

She was at the lake again, or near it. She’d been here before, passing by in the dark. She didn’t know why she’d come back.

That was a lie.

Madison knew why she’d come back, because she knew what she’d seen and heard on the lakeshore before. The voices she’d heard. The ones she’d wanted to run to but couldn’t make herself move towards. Of course she’d found Connor like that. Of course, he wasn’t alone.

Madison couldn’t remember if Connor and Faith had really been friends before now. She didn’t think he had any female friends really, and she knew that it was because of her. She knew it was stupid to assume that Faith had found Connor alone and snatched him up, and that they’d decided they liked each other a whole lot, and Connor had decided to protect Faith and forget all about his horrible murder-bitch of a girlfriend who had never been worth the trouble anyway. She couldn’t keep herself from assuming that, even if she told herself it was stupid. She shouldn't have even come here, returning to the scene of a crime that she couldn't even be sure was a crime.

Madison had always hated crying.

That was why she wasn’t crying, really, just sniffling a little bit as she sat alone on the edge of the pond in the dark. You could chalk it up to allergies, or to going unwashed for over a week straight. A bug flew in her eye. Nobody was going to cry over her, so why should she waste tears on anyone else?

She’d always known Connor was going to go off and find something better anyway.

That thought cut through her self-pity and inspired a flare of white-hot anger that was as intense as it was brief. For a moment, it gave her enough energy to shriek, voicing her frustration in a short, shrill noise. It echoed and set off a ripple effect of skittering and scrambling nearby as whatever wildlife had been prowling around fled from the noise. Good riddance. Madison didn’t want them, either.

She’d tried to be better, sometimes, and nobody had ever cared. Madison was always just going to be that bitch. Connor’s girlfriend that he invited to parties because she was hot, and because he felt obligated, not because anyone else wanted her there. She’d have rather had the rest of the class descend on her for killing Nathan and winning a prize for it, but they were all just ignoring her like they’d wanted to do all along.

She didn’t know what to do with herself. Wandering around, no outlet for her feelings except pouring them out in front of a camera that didn’t care, or-

Or the gun in her hand.

The gun didn’t care either, but Madison could control it, so maybe that was why she stood and found herself shooting wildly into the darkness.

It didn’t feel better. The recoil made her arm ache. The noise made her head hurt. The frustration kept building, and with another loud noise of disgust, Madison instead cocked her arm back and hurled the gun into the pond.

She stood there at the edge of the water for a moment, and then she tore in after it.

Stupid. That was her gun. That was all she had. Someone could kill her without it. Throwing it away was like throwing Nathan away all over again.

Madison wasn’t a strong swimmer, but the pond was shallow enough for her to stand. The cages in the middle gleamed in the weak moonlight, mockingly reflecting light back at her but not providing anything to really see by. She ducked under the water again and again, blindly groping on the bottom for the feel of the gun.

When her hand closed around it again, she could have cried for real. Madison yanked it up out of the water, cradling it to her chest. She was exhausted, all of a sudden. Screaming and shooting and thrashing around in the water, all on top of days and days of just struggling to exist. Feeling things she didn’t want to feel.

Madison stayed in the water, sinking down and half-floating on her back, cradling her gun and staring up at the sky. Connor’s letterman jacket was going to get ruined. She should have left it on the shore. But it was hers, now. Like Connor was supposed to have been hers, even if she didn’t deserve him.

Madison floated, and she nestled the barrel of the gun up under her chin. Not with any intent, she told herself. Just because. Just to feel something else. Everything she did was on impulse anyway, because she was a stupid bitch, and that’s how stupid bitches were.

The thought that she’d always be the same, no matter what, was almost comforting. When she pulled the trigger, that was impulse too.

G012 MADISON SPRINGER: DECEASED