His breath mingled with mine and his lashes fluttered against my skin. Here, I finally felt alive.
-
When Aurelia was small, she never imagined her life to be such a mess. She imagined herself going to school, hanging out with friends, and with a bo...
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AURELIA
4 YEARS AGO
I'm a horrible liar.
I lie when I can't tell the truth, I lie when I panic, and I lie to the people I love. Especially to the people I had loved.
And I'm lying to the woman in front of me as she asks me if I was the one who stole the pack of cigarettes from her store. My hands are tightly clasped behind me, fingernails cutting into my flesh. My chest hurts from the weight of the words that are escaping my mouth and the box of cigarettes are cutting into the cleavage of my breasts.
"I didn't take your cigarettes," I stated, forcing an aura of nonchalance. "If you had checked your busted cameras, then you'd know that."
A breeze swirled past us and a strand of hair escaped from the woman's ponytail. Agitated by it, she brushed it away, her glare still unwavering. The wrinkles on her forehead and around her lips made her look angrier than I hoped she was.
They aren't for me, I wanted to beg— to scream at her.
Behind us, a few ten feet away, Claire called out my name, "Lia, you coming or what?" Chills ran down my spine as I turned around and forced a smile onto my lips and a terse nod.
"Be right there," I beamed falsely.
The lady stared at me, running her eyes over my body in search of a sign of the clunky box of cigarettes. But before the lady could pat me down or worse, I stepped backward and broke out into a sprint down the street. The skirt of my uniform fluttered against my thighs as I sharply turned into an alleyway. A moment of relief cooled the sweat on the nape of my neck before I instantly froze again.
Claire, Sienna, and Gwen all stared at me expectantly, each of them sprawled out on the steps of some stairs. Claire's blonde hair fanned around her as she laid her head back on the stairs, her legs kicked open and her fingers tapping against her thigh. Sienna, sitting right next to her, had a bored expression on her face. Her curly brown hair and brown eyes did nothing to hide the fact that she was a bitch. Gwen, to the far left, had her legs crossed and her held head high, with a haunting stare fixed on my face. Her black-rimmed eyes bored into me.
I rolled my shoulders back and sucked in a breath before walking up to them.
"Finally!" Sienna sighed, springing up from her seat and rushing towards me. I pulled the cigarette box from where I had stashed it in my bra and handed it to her. Sienna greedily snatched it from my hand and frowned at me.
"You only got one pack?" She asked, incredulously. "We'd smoke this in an hour, tops."
I steeled my emotions and buttoned my shirt back up. "I got lucky with this one." Getting the cigarette box into my shirt without anybody noticing had been a feat on its own. The store owner had scurried to the back room for less than three seconds when I was able to tuck the cigarette pack into my sleeve. "It was laying out."
