I woke up to a blinding white light. It wasn’t like one of those street lights that always seem to be yellow though, this one was white. The light was pure white. I had no idea where I was, only that the last thing I could remember was yelling at Ashley. I tried to sit up, but I could feel a sharp pain shoot across my back, and knew I wasn’t going to be moving anytime soon. My vision was slowly returning, and instead of one big blur, there were several small blurs. “Hello?” I asked into the light. “Where am I?” I asked, only to be returned an answer that wasn’t what I expected. Instead of hearing a direct answer to my question, all I heard was “Honey? Hey everyone! She’s up!” The voice was deep and strong, but still you could hear the care emanating in it. Then I saw my dad, and other objects began to come into vision as well. There was a tray table to the right of my bed, and several machines near them too. To the left side of my room I saw a door that had a bathroom sign on it, and to the right of that was a door leading into the hallway. There were two chairs between the bathroom and the hallway, and three more chairs behind the machines to my right.

“Where am I?” I repeated, even though now that I could see the answer was obvious, so I continued to ask questions. “How did I get here? What happened?” I bombarded them with my questions until my dad calmed me down.

“Honey slow down. Your all right, but we all may need to have a long talk soon. As for what happened, at the prom there was a drive-by shooting.” That’s what it was, I was at the prom with Ashley. Now it’s all coming back to me, I got in a fight with Ashley over Aiden.

“Where’s Ashley?” I asked as soon as I put the pieces together. Apparently something in my dad’s head clicked because he seemed to snap to attention like someone who just got slapped across the face. He didn’t respond, he only handed me a piece of paper and said that he was sorry. I has no idea what he had to be sorry for, but decided with how quiet everyone was being, that I should just open the letter instead of asking another question. As I opened the letter everything started to make sense. Why no one was talking, why my dad was sorry. I understood it all. They had read the letter and known that Ashley was gone. So that was it. It was finally over between us.