Peekaboo's Life Story

• Shae Cronin, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2022

Peekaboo was a little girl before all of these terrible, horrible and cruel things happened to her. She doesn't know who she is becoming, she's terrified of looking at herself in the mirror. After the accident with her mother, she started to gain her appearance back, she wasn’t invisible anymore. She knew the world could sometimes be harsh when she was younger but she didn’t see how mean people could be when she grew up. Where there was once light in her eyes, now there was only loneliness and despair.

After It happened she was a serious mess, she had no choice but to run away because otherwise she would go to jail for the rest of her life. Just because Pippa killed her mother, her own flesh and blood, it didn’t mean she didn’t feel guilty, after all it was an accident. Every day, every waking hour she would think about what she had done, she eventually became paranoid, that’s why she killed those kids, they were asking too many questions about her personal life, she got nervous.

Pippa had a great childhood, she was a middle class citizen of Australia, she was relatively popular at school, she had the best brother anyone could hope for. Pippa’s brother, Heath, was the kindest person anyone could ever meet, he helped out wherever he could and would never fight with his family. He was a great student, straight A’s, but you can never really tell what’s going on inside of someone's body, you can never tell what someone is feeling on the inside. Heath always put on a brave face, but whenever someone wasn’t watching he turned away to hold back his tears.

Heath was diagnosed with clinical depression when he turned 17. At age 18 he got escorted to the hospital in an ambulance, you could hardly see him under all of the red gooey blood trickling down his body. Pippa was 11 at the time, it traumatised her for life, to see her brother that she loved deeply on the ground in his room covered head to toe in blood. Pippa was the first to find Heath, he was just laying there, lifeless, Pippa ran to his unconscious body, screaming and crying, calling out for somebody to help. The only problem was that no one else was home, her dad was working and her mum was out having brunch with some of her ‘girlfriends’ as she called them.

Pippa didn’t have a phone as her parents said she was too young. Where was Pippa’s father you might wonder? He died when she was 14, and it really was an accident. After her mum got home from brunch, she quickly dialed 000, but it was too late, her son, Pippa’s brother, had passed. That was the first time Pippa changed.