I am Jack's smirking revenge.

"Everything you said was a lie!" I screamed at him, moisture falling thick and fast past my eyes, down my face, soaking my shirt, melting my consciousness…

He smirked, and placed a single fist onto his right jaw, pretending to sock it. He made clever facial expressions, hoping to exasperate me, coming off as exhausted, pained, confused. No matter what I did, he still belonged to me. He was still a part of me.

"You can't escape me!" Jaimy yelled in my direction as I turned my back to run. "Stop trying!"

My pathetic lungs began to sear. I couldn't look back. I swore I wouldn't-

"Nice try."

I screamed. I blinked, and he was right there in front of me. The muscles in my face burned, ached-

"You can't get rid of me," he said again, and he dug into his pocket for a lighter to ignite the cigarette already perched between his pouting lips. "Remember when I shouted at your dad? Remember that time when you and I snuck out of your house at two in the morning? "

The blood drained from my face. I could feel it rushing into my toes.

He chuckled lightly, blowing out a veil of blue smoke from his cigarette. The fumes attacked my eyes, forcing tears to collect. Power built up from deep within my chest, and it came rushing out as a moist sob. "Jaimy…" I almost begged, backing up as each of my heavy footsteps traced dread. "Jaimy, please don't do this."

"But I must, Renee."

"You can't!" I finally screamed, pressing a palm to each of my ears. I clamped my teeth together and pressed my eyelids together as tightly as I could. Maybe I could just block him out…

BANG!

My eyes shot open. Was I dead?

"Open your eyes!" he yelled, the sly grin finally disappearing from his mouth. "What do you see? Huh? Tell me!"

I was cowering. Shaking. "Jaimy… I see only you."

He smiled. "That's the way it's supposed to be. When I finally kill you," he said, eyeballing his shotgun and cocking it with two hands, smoke between his lips, "only the parts you wanted of yourself…that you never had…will be the only parts that will ever exist."

"N-no-no!" I cried. "You can't! Why are you doing this?"

"You knew it was coming, Renee-"

"Stop!"

"Will you just shut up and stand still-"

"JAIMY!"

The cigarette fell out of his mouth as his mouth formed a wide O in shock, not expecting I would rebel against him. His mouth hung open as silence hung onto the air until he began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, striding towards me with open arms, trying to wrap his arms around me, but I pushed him away.

"It's crazy what a person will do to survive," I managed between gasps for air. Between one breath and his next, my hand wrapped around the shotgun in his left hand, dangling aimlessly, and I yanked it from his grip. The point came to a nice resting position between his eyes. He only had a second to make a pinched face before the bullet blasted a hole through his brain.

He was dead.

I was alive. I watched my alter-ego collapse before my heaving body.

I was Jaimy Volkov: straight-A student, piano prodigy, and a weaver of words, enough to make the opposite sex cry.

He was me: lazy, susceptible to emotions and an occasional bout of cowardice.

With his last gasp for air, I witnessed what life would have been like with a better me, die. It felt pretty good.