[b][center][color=662d91][h1]Isabella[/h1][/color][/center][/b]


In Isabella’s opinion, mornings were almost universally the absolute worst part of any regular day. It was almost as though whoever coded the universe into place had designed it that way. Your eyes would sometimes be glued shut with weird stuff on them that, according to some children’s story, was from a “sandman” guy. She didn’t remember the story very well, but he sprinkled sand into people's eyes as they slept for some reason, and it was probably the most annoying thing to wake up to. 

Isabella was fully aware that there was probably an actual scientific reason for it that she never bothered to look up, but it was a lot easier to get mad at a personification than at science. 

Another eye related reason mornings sucked was waking up with dry eyes, which was almost always accompanied with a dry throat. While just as annoying as the earlier sand stuff, it got one over it by somehow discouraging her from actually getting out of bed, which confused Isabella. You’d think the body would encourage pulling itself out of bed when it’s dealing with that stuff, right? But no, the human body was perfectly intent to keep her frozen still under the sheets as her eyes grew itchy and her throat grew uncomfortably warm.

It was always those first minutes waking up that were the absolute worst like that, and it seemed that today would be no different. Forcing her weakened limbs to move, Isabella managed to rip herself away from the twin sized bed and got both of her two feet onto the floor. A monumental accomplishment for… seven in the morning, as the clock read. Which meant, Isabella realized as she groaned, that her body had woken her up an hour earlier than her alarm. 

Which meant she had absolutely nothing to do for the next hour. Any homework that she might need to do was already done, she didn’t really have any games to play in the morning, and the cafeteria wouldn’t be open for another… thirty something minutes? It didn’t really matter, she tried to keep her breakfast consistent and tried to always eat it at around eight forty, so it wasn’t like she was going to eat anything soon.

Isabella hobbled around half awake, hunting down that water bottle that her eyes dearly needed, and tried to figure out how to kill time until her first class started.

… She decided to mess around with some rune combinations to show Alice later.

...

Her first class of the day was always math related. It was either physics or calculus, and it depended on the day which one had come first. As today was a wednesday, Isabella’s first class would end up being calculus, since physics was never on wednesdays. 

It wasn’t like it mattered to her very much, though. Both of them were easily her worst classes. And it wasn’t like she blamed the teachers-... well, she kind of blamed the teachers, but she wouldn’t say that it was entirely their teaching that was doing her in. Most of the time, Isabella knew that when a person failed at something, it was usually their own fault. She was no exception to that. If she failed a quiz, it was really just because she didn’t study enough. None of her teachers were that bad, even if her calculus teacher talked a bit too fast for her liking, most bad results were ultimately her own fault, in her eyes.

Some might say that this was some kind of complex, with how often she attributed her failures to her own self, but Isabella couldn’t disagree more. More often than not, her failures were quite simply the result of her just… not studying particularly hard for something, or leaving something for the last minute because she just didn’t care enough to do it beforehand.

And she had no trouble admitting that, because… She didn’t really even want to be there. College was just an obligation, really. Another checkmark in life, just like middle school and high school. It didn’t matter if she liked it or not, because she’d be stuck dealing with it regardless. 

That said, she would admit a preference to college over middle and high school, if only in that she wasn’t forced to transfer every semester.

Isabella sat in the middle left side of the room, close to the wall. There was no assigned seating like back in high school, anyone could sit anywhere they wanted, but Isabella preferred the consistency of just having one seat for the year and tried to keep it that way as often as she could. Even if she got to class too slow, and her usual seat was taken, she would take whatever seat in that row was closest to her usual spot.

The class itself was always at least somewhat helpful, when Isabella paid attention. The instructor was old and had a bit of a lisp when he spoke, but it was plenty obvious that the man had the credentials to teach the class. 

Which was a lot more than she could say for her humanities teacher.

...

Isabella’s classes came and went with little fanfare, nothing especially important was going on in any of them. Calculus, for all that the teacher was good at his job, was math, and was accordingly boring. Humanities always turned into some weird debate thing that Isabella never quite had the energy to join in on, and always wondered if she’d accidentally signed up for a debate club instead of ancient history. And her last class of the day, chemistry, was in much the same boat as math.

Ultimately, a whole lot of nothing that she just didn’t really care for. So it was incredibly relieving to open the door to the occult club and to be greeted with the sight of Alice running about the room, trying to pull off what Isabella assumed to be some elaborate magic trick. 

The blonde haired girl momentarily paused after she noticed Isabella at the door, giving a quick “Hi Izzy!” before carrying on with whatever trick she’d decided to try out today. After Isabella had joined, the occult club sort of branched out a little into a joint occult-magician sort of thing. Though, they were kind of the only two members, so it wasn’t really a branching out thing so much as it was combining their interests. Even if it didn’t quite seem like she was getting the trick right, it got a simile out of Isabella.

She’d actually learned a good bit of stuff from the club, or rather, from Alice and their team effort internet information gathering sessions. Norse stuff, Egyptian stuff, kabbalah, and so on and so forth, they made a decent enough pair at looking around and finding out neat stuff. Though, like mentioned earlier, it was far from all they did. Sometimes, they’d be practicing a bunch of magic tricks and try and see who could stump the other on how it worked. Sometimes they’d go out and look at some place that was getting called haunted or something. And sometimes, they just talked for a bit.

In a lot of ways, the club was… less of a club, and more of a hangout spot for a pair of friends.

Though, today was a day they’d actually be going out and doing something.

Even if Isabella was a bit less into paranormal stuff than Alice was, there was something to be said about checking so-called ‘haunted houses’ for ghosts. 

And Alice had found a new place to check out, so it’d probably be a good time.

...

As she lay bleeding out on the floor, a phone call with someone shouting on the other end that she could no longer make out, Isabella found some measure of comedy that, in spite of everything, she still would only manage to hold a friendship for a single year. Though the circumstances in this case would be that she was literally about to die, it was still true.

She had all the evidence, and her friend would be able to spread it all around since Isabella sent everything she had recorded her way as fast as she could. And so could her parents, she supposed, since that was who she’d called in her final moments.

Honestly, she couldn’t help but wish she hadn’t called at all. Despite everything, Isabella didn’t want the last memories her family would have of her to be the sound of her choking on her own blood.

It just felt horrible.

If there was any silver lining to the blood dripping from her throat, it was that she knew Alice had made it out. There was no way she’d survive long enough for help to arrive, but she knew Alice would, and that was what mattered. Even if she wasn’t going to make it, with the information Alice had, there was no way the person who did it was going to get away scot free- and definitely not when she wasn’t the only victim.

It wasn’t like she wanted to die, or something. She’d barely done anything with her life, this wasn’t at all how she had wanted it to end, you know? Isabella had wanted something long, she wanted to be successful, she wanted to do something with her life, and didn’t everyone? Wasn’t that normal?

… Though, it wasn’t like it mattered. She doubted that the killer particularly cared about what she wanted out of her life.

Her hand moved to its final position, gently placed on her old deck of cards, as she continued to try and think. 

Her eyes began to shut against her will, and though she could hear her mothers desperate voice, and her fathers panicked shouting, she stopped being able to make out what was being said. 

Isabella tried to think about Alice.

She tried to think about that cafe that was open until eleven, that she and Alice had planned to hit up after they’d wrapped up. She tried to think about all their talks about how they could make some kind of magic spell out of whatever occult or religious thing they had taken interest in on that particular day. She tried to think about the car they’d driven over in. She tried to hope that Alice wouldn’t blame herself.

Through her bloodied throat, she choked out as many words as she could manage on the phone.

And soon, she stopped talking.

And soon, she stopped thinking.

The phone only got louder.