When Sebastian Met June ✓

Part Three

High School:

Seventeen-year-old June has only had one real relationship and it ended with him putting a restraining order on her. It only added to the growing record June has acquired in more recent years. She's spent more than one night on the stiff, concrete floors of a piss-smelling jail cell.

June has learned and mastered the art of getting her way through manipulation. It works well on her foster parents. Donna and Sam are a devoted couple who, unable to have children of their own, found the foster care system as their second opportunity. Sadly, they struggle to connect with the teenage June, who is like an iceberg in the middle of a drowning ocean.

Social services stepped in when June was fifteen. Her mother hadn't stepped foot in the apartment for nearly a year by then, Nadine being raised by June. In that period of her life, June had studied how to pull heartstrings to get what she desired, money. A survival tactic that she later crafted to her use.

Words hold power, and June, with a mind similar to a dictionary, applies them. When she wants something or someone, she gets it. To what point she will go to keep it holds no bounds. That's why her first relationship, Thomas Yates in her sophomore year, had ended so recklessly.

At this point she had gotten into drugs and other recreational things, which she'd had also pressured Thomas into as well. When he tried to break up with her, though, feeling quite uncomfortable in her presence at times, she dragged him back. Using her life as a pawn in many instances.

She wanted control over him. It was a result of past trauma that has molded the clay of who she is now. By society's standards, June appears ordinary. She has filled out in most places, even growing into her awkward frame. But after a simple conversation with her, it is apparent that June isn't like most kids her age. In fact, June seems to have no empathy at all.

She is the hollow of a person with no remorse for their actions.

It is sorrowful out at this hour. The only open place is the dingy 24-hour gas station she marches towards, kicking a pebble along the way. Her foster parents are out for the night, making sneaking out a much easier feat. Only the house key is stuffed deep in her new designer jeans, a studded decale on her back jeans pocket. Her once unruly hair is now cornrow braided to her head, a costly expense. A smile forms on her lips. Her foster parents have plenty of money that June would often steal.

June pitied them and how sadly they tried to fix her.

The bell above her head chimes as she opens the glass door, stepping into the cold four-walled box. It is like stepping into a freezer, one that smells like mildew. Mold grows above the freezers which line the back wall, half of the cases empty. June clutches her sweater tighter around her skinny frame, her hands stuffed deep in her pockets.

"Hey, little lady, don't cause me no trouble. I don't know what your doin' out at an hour like this, but I aint want none of it." The man behind the glass dome calls out to her.

He is an older man with a graying mustache and stocky frame that squeezes behind the tiny space. It is obvious in the way he slouches, to an assessing June, that he'd rather be anywhere else. He won't be able to intercept her if she runs, quick as a rabbit on her long legs.

"No sir," she shakes her head, making her voice as wholesome as possible. People seem to fall for the good girl act. Nobody suspected a girl of her size and shape to have such cruel intentions.

June strides into the candy aisle, her fingertips grazing the candy packages as if they are book spines. June lost her love for reading when she was separated from her sister Nadine, realizing that the real world was much more jarring. Fairytales were just that, tales written by people who wanted so badly to believe they could someday come true.