Rue

After the crash, I open my eyes to see shattered glass around me, and I feel my head throbbing with intense pain. I touch my head, and as I look down on my hand, I see blood. I close my eyes, and I hear people gathering around the car and calling an ambulance.

Harry jolts awake to realize that it was all just a dream. As he lies in his bed, he keeps thinking about the dream. It was just so vivid, he thinks to himself. After a while, he gets up to look at the time and sees that he is late for his training session with the company director. He quickly gets ready, and as he is about head out when he looks in the mirror to see blood on his forehead. 

He sees his mother standing at the end of the stairs, and he hurriedly goes to her. "mom," he calls, but when she doesn't turn around, he touches her shoulder, "mom," but she doesn't say anything. She keeps looking at her mobile phone in shock, and she starts crying. Harry has forgotten all about his bleeding forehead and tries to get his mother to look at him, and he keeps asking her, "mom, what happened? Please tell me what happened." But she doesn't say anything to him. She just keeps crying. He goes to call Sarah his half-sister. He was sure she would know what to do in this situation. He found it hard to get along with Sarah nowadays, but they would stick together in emergencies. He goes up to her bedroom door and knocks, "Sarah come quickly". 

Before he can explain anything to her, she rushes out. She doesn't even look at him; she goes straight to their mother. Sarah goes and sits next to her. She doesn't say anything; it's as if she knows what has happened. "What happened? Somebody tells me what happened," he shouts, frustrated with them for not telling him anything. They don't even look at him as if they were pretending that he doesn't exist. He doesn't know what to do. His mother and Sarah keep crying. Harry feels like a child who is not told anything as the adults will handle it.

His mother's phone starts ringing, and she quickly picks up, "Hello, John, Is it true?" It was his father on the phone. "Where are you?" She asks, and she rushes out of the house with the car keys in hand. Sarah goes after her, and Harry doesn't know what to do. Were they mad at him? He didn't know what he had done to make all of them behave this way with him? Suddenly he thinks back to the dream that felt too real, the blood on his forehead and his mother and sister acting as if he didn't exist. That is when he realizes they can't see him. He starts to remember that he got up in the morning and left for work, and on the way, they crashed into another car.

No, this is crazy, that's impossible I can't be dead, he thinks and spends the next 30 minutes going in front of the maid and the cook to see if they could see him or hear him at least.

After realizing that he is a ghost, he thinks about how happy he was last night when his father announced that he would take over the company. He finally had his father's approval. For years he and Sarah had been competing for the position. She was three years older than him, and she was his father's daughter from his previous marriage. His mother treated Sarah as her own, and they got along. Harry and Sarah used to be close when they were young, but Harry felt they could never connect after having to compete for the position.

Last night after their father's announcement, Sarah had been angry she didn't say anything but her expressions made it evident that she was angry. Perhaps she felt she deserved it, Harry thought to himself. As Harry went upstairs to his room, he had seen Sarah and his father arguing, "You can't do this," she was saying. Harry didn't stick around to hear the rest. He assumed she would be okay with the decision after a while. Maybe they would be able to have a better relationship now, he had thought.

He remembered when they had met this morning, she was behaving quite oddly. She was not talking to their father. His mother was trying her best to make her feel better, but nothing seemed to be working. Harry and Sarah did not speak much except when he was about to leave in his car. "You can take my car today," he was getting a bit tired of her attitude, and he felt she was sulky because their father had selected him. "No, I want to take mine," he tells her. "Just take mine. I don't see what the problem is," she snaps at him. "The problem is that you are behaving like a whiny child" Sarah glares at him and is about to say something when Harry looks at his watch and says, "I don't have time for this. I will take your car". As he was driving away, he saw her looking at him with sadness in her eyes.

He's thinking about this when he hears the cook telling the maid, "I heard someone tempered with the car. It wasn't an accident" Harry doesn't know what to think because he doesn't want to imagine that it's true. That there was even a 1 percent chance that Sarah played a part in his accident, but the more he thought about, the more he realized that it could be true. The way she switched the cars this morning and how angry she was.

As he is thinking, he sees that his father is back home. He follows his father, and he sees that he is packing some clothes. Harry was hoping to see Sarah as if somehow by looking at her, he could determine that she had no part in his accident. He follows his father into the car, and after a while, they arrive at the hospital. Harry recalled that they always came to this hospital if they were sick, and coincidentally, both Sarah and Harry were born in this hospital. He follows his father inside, and that's when he asks himself why his father would bring clothes to the hospital, but he couldn't think of anything.

He sees his father walk to his mother, and he sees that they were standing outside the morgue, and he goes in. He sees a body on the table, and he goes closer. Lying on the table was Sarah's lifeless body. 

Harry comes out of the morgue, and she whispers into his ear, "Hello, little brother." He turns around to see Sarah smiling at him; shocked, he screams. "Got you," she says and laughs. After calming down, Harry says 

"This doesn't make any sense. No, this cannot happen. You shouldn't be able to see me. More importantly, why were you on that table. Does this mean we are both dead?"

"Well, turns out I miscalculated. I thought they would only go after you, but it turns out we were both on the list, and you are not dead" He doesn't know what to say to this; He had no idea what she was talking about. She looks at me with regret in her eyes. "What happened to you?" He asks her with his teary eyes. 

"Well, it all started two weeks ago. Dad was being blackmailed, and well, he refused to pay them. I agreed with him, but then they started to threaten that they would harm the family. I told him he should just pay them to be safe, but he was relentless, said they would keep demanding more and more if he listened to them. So I thought if he can't do that, we should not be in the public eye, but when he announced that you would be taking over, that changed. Now we were exposed in a way" He doesn't know how to react to any of this, so he asks again, "Why are you dead?" She shakes her head, "so impatient. Okay, so this morning, I wanted you to take my car so that if someone was targeting you, they wouldn't know it was you. I went out in your car, and they followed me, and well, you can guess the rest".

"You should have saved yourself. Why would you do something so stupid when you knew it would lead to this" He shouts at Sarah, and she thinks for a while and then softly says, "Because I knew that if I didn't, you would be on that table. I didn't want to live in a world that you didn't exist in" as she says this she begins to fade "What about me? What am I suppose to do without you? Please don't go," I beg her. She hugs me tightly. "Am already gone, Harry. It will be alright," and Harry shakes his head, "no, no, no, this is all a dream."

He woke up to find his mother looking at him with worried eyes, and she shouted, "Call the doctor quickly." One after another, doctors keep checking upon him. His father comes to him with tears streaming down his face "Am so glad you are awake" Harry doesn't say anything because he knew if he did, it would be to blame him for everything that happened. If he had handled the situation in a better way, Sarah would be alive, or if he gave them what they wanted, she would be here with them. All-day, these thoughts were in his head, but he didn't voice his thoughts. If he was heartbroken and grieving, he could not imagine what his parents must be feeling. Yet he was mad at his father for the fact that he made them compete. They don't tell him that she is gone, but they don't need to because he remembered everything.