It wasn’t the kind of thing that you just got over. That September they had been turned from school girls to victims overnight. They had been chosen for a reason. They had been the loudest. The strongest. The boldest. The most capable. It was a lesson. David had wanted them to see that it didn’t matter how strong you thought you were, like him, you could always end up weak. He wanted them to cry for him, he wanted them to bleed for him.
It was an untold story on the front of every newspaper, the four girls who had gone missing for 48 hours in the middle of the city. The four girls who had managed to fight their way out of the hands of a serial killer who had started to make his mark on the world. They had outlived him, outran him, outwitted him and outfought him. They had escaped by the skin of their teeth and every day after that they knew they would be survivors. There was no weakness left besides his name scarred into their skin so they’d never forget.
They had hated each other before and they had hated each other after, bound only by the terrible hours they had shared realising just how easy it was to strip them of everything that was meant to be important, their own sense of self. Only Syndney ever spoke about it and when she did the press swallowed her tale of survival whole-- like leeches, they clung onto every detail until they all drained away.
The problem was that escaping a monster had fastened them into versions of themselves that looked the same but did not feel the same. Their support system crashed at their feet because they were resilient to help, they refused helping hands and they carried their misery like a burden to remind them that they deserved to hurt the people around them because something evil had touched them. They created chaos without meaning to, they clung to all the wrong things, forfeited to all the wrong people. When weakness came knocking on their door in the form of the people they loved, they closed that door, slid over the bolt and told themselves that was the right thing to do.