Teen Survivors 💰 S.S.

Time of Death

It was a nice and sunny afternoon and Cora was laughing as she ran over to one of the swings.

"Laura, can you push me so I could go as high as the bar?" she asked as she moved to sit in one.

Laura smiled at her. "Yeah, I'll see what I can do."

School was over and they were in the midst of summer now. This now left the Hale children with a whole lot of new free time on their hands. Cora had to deal with was a summer reading list but she had already made a decent sized dent in it. Laura had also graduated and had been caught up in all of the post-graduation madness. Things like summer parties and trying to dodge some attempts of horny graduates trying to squeeze one last hoorah before they all went their separate ways. But right now, Laura wanted to take a break from all that and spend a day in the park with her little sister.

Laura was calmly pushing her nine year old sister on the swing as her eyes when her eyes fell on an ice cream truck stopping nearby. "Hey Cora, I'm in the mood for a cone. How about you?"

"Yeah," she said excitedly.

"Okay, come on."

They went to get themselves a cone and were now sitting together on one of the benches, just watching nothing and everything going on around them.

"Laura?" Cora asked all of a sudden.

"Yeah?"

"Is mom going to be late coming home again?"

For the last few weeks, their mother had been out, sometimes with her betas, and seemed to be looking through the town, and even the woods for something. If Laura didn't know any better, she would swear that her mother was trying to track something down. Or someone. But when she asked her, she had said that it wasn't something for her to worry about. From the sound of it, Laura guessed that it might even be personal.

"I don't know. Maybe. Hey, I didn't see Derek around when I got up."

"Oh, I did. He left when you were in the bathroom. Said that he wanted to go meet with a friend of his."

Laura had been noticing that Derek had been sneaking off more and more recently. She didn't know why, but she didn't like it. Suddenly, a hard scent of depression entered her nostrils. Depression, despair and grief. She looked around and saw that it seemed to be coming from a sea saw close by. There were two boys on it. Both looked around Cora's age. One was tanned skin and had dark shaggy hair while the other had paler skin and lighter floppy like hair. It seemed that the scent was coming from the lighter one.

"Hey Cora," she said as she kept her eyes on the boys. "Do you know who they are?" she asked pointing them out. "It looks like they might be your age."

Cora followed where she pointed to and she nodded. "Yeah, they're both in my grade. The lighter one, that's Stiles."

"Stiles?" Laura asked skeptically. "That's his name?"

"Well it's what everyone calls him. I think his name is supposed to be something too hard to actually say."

"Huh," she said taking that information in. "What about the other one?" she asked pointing to the tanner skinned boy.

"That's Scott. They're best friends."

"You know them well?"

Cora shrugged. "Not really. Only a little. Why?"

"That boy, Stiles, he's smiling but I can tell he's really sad. I'm able to smell his sadness all the way over here. And his friend feels sad for him too."

"Oh, his mom just died."

"What?"

"Yeah. He was absent from school for a couple of times this year. Everyone was talking about it for a bit. His mom had been in the hospital. She was sick with something and he often stayed with her. She died a few weeks ago."