The Road Back To You {COMPLETED}

Chapter 6

Most love stories went like this: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back, and they live happily ever after. Cadence Gillies's love story hadn't gone anything like that.

She stood before the bay windows of her bedroom and stared at the red maple tree outside, its leaves dancing like little flames in the chilly autumn breeze. She'd had her choice of one of two bedrooms, and she'd picked this one because of the red maple. Its fall colors were breathtaking, like something out of a dream or a wonderland, and when the sun kissed the tree's canopy with the gentleness of its late afternoon light, the leaves glowed like a hundred red lanterns reaching heavenward.

Cadence touched her fingertips to the glass and wished those lanterns would take her with them. To say the last few weeks at school had been eventful was a gross understatement. Starting a new school with zero friends wasn't new to her but that didn't make it any less torturous. Leading up to her first day, she'd been besieged by sleepless nights, mild panic attacks, and an overwhelming desire to suggest the option of home schooling to her parents.

Cadence had never been the it-girl, the class clown, the social butterfly, the all-star athlete, or any of the other high school superlatives she'd watched others so naturally assume. She was just Cadence; every-day-girl extraordinaire, the type of person classmates knew of but never really knew anything about; someone whose absence was unnoticed when she missed school.

Of course, the kids at her new school didn't know that Cadence yet. Upon hearing that she hailed from California, they descended upon her like paparazzi on a starlet, asking if she'd ever met a celebrity in Hollywood, if she went surfing every weekend, if she'd ever been in an earthquake. Cadence wasn't the type of introvert who secretly fantasized about popularity so the growing attention made her brain somewhat short-circuit as she tried to field their endless questions.

Like kids and their toys on the day after Christmas, her classmates eventually lost interest. It didn't take them long to figure out she wasn't the stereotypical vivacious blonde bombshell from the Hills and that's around the time they stopped trying to become best friends with her. Though, to be fair, she felt they should've understood the ill comparison from the get-go, seeing as how she was just shy of five-feet-five and as thin as a Raggedy Anne doll.

"Boring," was what she'd overheard one girl mutter to her friend when someone had asked Cadence what her typical Friday night looked like. Granted, maybe boring was a fair description, as all Cadence did on any night of the week was stay home with little desire to do anything else.

So once again, Cadence was on the fringes of another student body. Not entirely an outlier—that honor was reserved for the stoners and the other weirdos—but not someone who'd receive an invitation to the cool kids' house parties.

That's why she found it unnerving when she came to school earlier this week and found herself under the scrutiny of dozens of stares, pockets of students whispering to each other as they watched her pass by in the hall. Her chest tightened as she felt the whispering's of a panic attack. She looked down at herself—had she spilled something down the front of her blouse, did dog crap cover her ballet flats, was her jean zipper down? She disappeared into a bathroom to check her hair and face next, twisting her body to see if there was anything on her back. Everything passed her inspection.

It wasn't until her second-period class that she finally discovered the seeds that had blossomed into today's campus-wide gossip. A trio of girls who'd been talking amongst themselves while throwing the occasional glance in Cadence's direction finally approached her with grins.