Melia
Melia awoke suddenly and sat up with a small gasp. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes and trying to clear her head, Melia could see nothing but darkness. 'What time is it?' Melia thought and glanced at her alarm clock. It was blinking, meaning that the power had gone out at some point in the night and had reset the time. 'That's odd,' Melia thought vaguely. The house was a bit run down but they had never had any trouble with the power before. Instanty her mind jumped to a book series where magic-electricity interaction caused power failures but she brushed that thought aside.
Reaching across her bed to the table that stood beside it she turned the clock off, making a metal note to correct the time at some later point. Beside where the electronic clock had stood was Melia's little cell phone. Lightly brushing her fingers over the table top, since she was not wearing her glasses and the room was pitch black (making it hard to see anything), Melia picked up the phone. It was one of those dinosaur phones that old people used. She picked up her cell phone and turned it on, looking for the time as the light temporarly blinded her.
3:15 AM.
Melia groaned softly, tossing the phone back onto the bedside table and covering her eyes with her arm, wishing that she were still asleep. She hated when this happened. Melia would wake up in the wee hours of the morning, before the sun had cast even the smallest ray over the land, and was unable to fall asleep again. It was better some nights than others. Sometimes she wasn't able to go to sleep again, other times she was asleep in a matter of minutes. On the rare occasion she slept through the whole night without a hitch; but that obviously wasn't tonight.
Why she did this though was always a mystery. She had no sleep disorders and could never recall any nightmares which may have woken her up. Plus, as a teenager, she ought to be able to sleep until mid-afternoon. All of these shallow excuses were in a mind set of good humor as Melia always liked to put a positive or comical spin on things. But in the back of her mind there was a small voice she couldn't get rid of. A nagging, whisper of a voice in the back of her head she could never quite silence, which told her;
‘It’s because you were left on the door step right about now. Seventeen years has passed and you're still troubled by it. This is why you continue to wake up at this time, because you are hoping that somehow your mother has decided not to set you down.’
Tears welled up in the girl’s eyes behind her arm, which was draped limply over her face. Maybe this little voice was speaking the truth. Maybe all these years later, seventeen whole years, she still felt the heart-wretching abandonment a child of any age feels when they know their own mother doesn't love them. Even so long after, maybe Melia still woke up the moment her biological mother set her down, hoping beyond time and space these weak hopes that her mother would change her mind and keep the baby she left behind so long ago. As the tears spilt past the lids of her closed flower pink eyes and trickled down her temples, leaving trails of salt before they vanished into her soft pinkish-blonde hair, Melia silently cried. Normally, with the help of these troubled thoughts who visited her in the night, she would cry herself back to sleep like she had so many times before.
But little did Melia know, tonight was the first of many nights that would be "abnormal".
From down the hall she heard noises and the soft calling of her good friend Mikan. "Hello? Mel, Cal, Nadi, is that one of you?" she called uncertainly and Melia sat up, confused. "I'm in my room Mika. Is something wrong?" she called back in reply, pushing the covering back and slidding out of her warm bed, her toesies hitting the carpeted floor of her bedroom. Her nightgown swished from side to side (it was one of those nice, silky ones Melia adored, although this one was hugging her large breasts rather uncomfortably and was a touch, well, see through) as she opened her door and peeked her head out, looking down the hallway where she say Mikan... with a baseball bat? She was about to ask her friend why she was weilding a bat when suddenly she heard sounds. She felt a chill run down her spine. 'There's an intruder in the house!' she thought, alarmed, 'Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what do we do?'