Fear of the Dark
“Come back here! Are you afraid?”
“Shut up!”
Jake left his friends in the middle of the room and sat down on the couch. Dumbasses. Who had the stupid idea of telling horror stories anyway? Just because it was late night? They should have kept playing videogames…
Now all they talked about was monsters, shadows that strolled around their streets, ghosts in their grandparents’ houses and other gibberishes that scared only small children. Well, maybe it scared them too, but not him! He was almost ten, he wasn’t afraid of the dark or the thunders anymore, he didn’t lose his sleep thinking on what could be hiding under his bed or inside his closed.
Okay, he still had a flashlight hidden under his pillow, but it has been months since he last used it! And he had a good reason for that. That noise at his window could be anything, even a bandit trying to break into his house during the night! He couldn’t have guessed it was just the wind…
He could go home. After all, he lived just two blocks away from there, but how could he just walk away alone? Of course he wasn’t afraid of walking alone! He knew the neighborhood well; there was nothing there at night that wasn’t there during daytime. The problem was him becoming the gang’s joke for the rest of the week if he went home just now that they had started telling scary tales.
And he wasn’t scared of what they were talking about, no! He just wasn’t much into that kind of stories. They were just silly stories, tales of phantoms, vampires and werewolves. Nothing like that would impress him. They were just stupid for thinking it was so fun…
He turned on the TV in search of something better. His finger went straight into the sequence of numbers that lead to the cartoons channel, but he switched it before the other guys noticed it. It wasn’t like he was embarrassed of his friends… They certainly watched cartoons too, but he wasn’t really in the mood of watching it. Luckily, he found a good action movie filled with noisy explosions and gunshots. Now that was fun!
And there he stood, waiting for the others to become tired of that child’s play. At the TV, the hero distributed punches and gunshots, while the boys at the corner of the living room kept talking. Now someone was saying that a werewolf hid in an abandoned barn at his grandpa’s farm, and that every full moon, a lamb disappeared. Only the bones remained, and the all other animals were scared for a whole week…
