The Runaways

Chapter 29 (Part 1)

Hailey

Plain and simple, I knew we couldn’t end well.

Hollywood endings are bullshit. Love stories are lies.

Cause reality never quite works out the way you want it to. In the world outside of movie scripts, things fall apart. I knew that better than anybody. So, what the hell was I doing?

Holding hands and running through the rain like God and Nicholas Sparks had teamed up to plan the evening?

Nothing about anything I’d done in the last twenty-four hours was sane. Didn’t matter how I looked at it, being near Caleb made me crazy.

Touching him made me crazier, and kissing him was—well, ridiculous ‘cause I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have done a lot of things. But I guess that’s what crazy people do.

Everything they shouldn’t. Everything backwards.

The last thing standing between me being me, and me being out of my mind, was a good excuse. And I needed one. Badly.

Or at least an explanation as to why I'd lost eighteen years of common sense in the last three days.

My parents were gonna have a hay-day at the psychiatrist’s office if they got me back in one piece. Dad would call me a psycho, Mom would chalk up my brand new problems to Stockholm, and within a week I'd be drugged up and dragged off to kidnapping therapy.

But the kidnapping wasn't the problem. Or least, it wasn't the whole problem.

Sure, I'd seen things I wish I could've taken back, things I'd probably have nightmares about for the rest of my life. That is, if I even lived through all this. But the real reason the shrinks were going to end up carting me off to the loony bin was Caleb Evans. Caleb—sweaty-palms—Evans, the bad excuse who managed to turn my guts into cotton candy every time he smiled.

The two of us trailed Mrs. Lee through the last half mile of the woods, dragging our feet through the muddy waters of muddy feelings we both knew were nothing but trouble.

Especially me.

I hated this. I hated feeling blind, dumb, and numb to all the warning signs I couldn't afford to miss twice.

'Cause bad things happen when you don’t pay attention, and a couple summers ago, I didn't.

Back then, I thought pretty boys had pretty intentions, and kisses meant playing for keeps. But seeing the world through freshman colored goggles does that to people. I didn't know that getting butterflies around the senior boys were red flags in disguise. So I swan-dived into the deep end of the high school pool without even knowing how to swim.

That one time—on an afternoon when the air was heavy and thick, like slow drying sap on maple trees, I made a mistake.

I probably was the only girl in my grade that summer who hated hot syrupy days, senior parties, and skimpy clothes. I was a stay-in kinda gal who curled up with paperback writers like Lewis Carroll instead of pretty boys like Luke Davenport—a clean cut, green-eyed, senior who used to copy my notes in English.

Like Caleb, Luke had a Kodak smile, and all of his friends hated it because the kid never had braces. Sometimes, I liked to pretend a couple of those Kodak smiles were meant for me. But Luke liked beautiful girls, Ralph Lauren model-types with straightened blonde hair and St. Tropez tan lines—not pale, awkward, bookworms.

His three-year girlfriend kept her skin a perfect bronze.

I couldn’t keep up with her, but neither could Luke.