Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
RENNA DIDN'T FEEL EMPTY, YET she didn't feel full. In fact, she didn't feel anything at all.
She was disassociated with the world, as if she was and were never a part of it. Her mind had stopped working, her entire body shutting down as she denied the acceptance of the unfortunate passing of her three best friends.
She never allowed herself to move, to blink, to even think - and on the scarce occasion that she did, it was always the same. Sarah, John B, Atticus. It was always the same three people.
Her mother was constantly in court, trying to legally kick her father out of their house for good. Her brother was at a friend's house, not someone that Renna had fought with or even known of before. And Renna herself, poor, struggling Renna, was hidden away in their curtain-drawn holiday home on the edge of the marsh, listening to the waves crash against the shore outside her window as she stayed lying in the same bed she'd inhabited for the past four days straight.
She hadn't moved, hadn't changed, hadn't eaten - and as disgusting as it sounded, she couldn't seem to make herself do any better. Nobody had visited, her friends didn't know where she was, except for Kiara. Kiara had seen the girl grieving over her dead grandmother when she was fourteen and a half, when she was stuck in an unmoving space of time in which only herself could manage to live through. The only person Renna had allowed herself to talk to besides her family was Atticus Fletcher, but he was gone. So, whenever JJ or Pope expressed their concerns for the disappearing girl, Kiara only shrugged it off, because she knew what she was like, and how much she valued her privacy, so she left the empty girl alone.
In some ways, she blamed herself. In those rare periods where Renna allowed her thoughts to run free - when her three late friends weren't occupying every space inside her mind - she thought about what could have been done. What shecould have done. What if she'd stayed behind and travelled over to the boat and waved goodbye? What if she'd made Atticus follow after her? What if she'd caught her father earlier, so that none of the tragedy and breaking of hearts would have happened? And sometimes, when everything got too hard, what if she'd jumped on the boat with them and drowned beneath the ocean? What if she had died too?
She knew it was selfish, everything she was doing was selfish. Her friends needed her, they were dealing with the heavy grief too, but she just could not move. Her phone, sitting on the table across the room, hadn't been touched since the accident, because she could not move. She'd watched it light up, the background of Atticus swinging from a tree flashing from the device and illuminating the room blinded her eyes as the rush, the wave, of tears flushed through again.
