All The Shattered Ones [CHONI]

Chapter 4

Toni managed a few more hours of sleep that night – maybe three or four, waking up a couple of times in between. The way Cheryl had reacted to that nightmare earlier was hard to push to the side and she was afraid she'd have another, but every time she glanced across to look at her face it was neutral, forcing the other girl to shut her eyes once again with a slap on her own wrist for being so paranoid.

Sometimes she succeeded; other times she would sit there for a good thirty minutes, tired as hell but unable to succumb to her body's request. At one point or another, sick of being awake and sick of thinking about all the other girl had been through and sick of thinking about how anyone could do that to a human being, she allowed a few tears slip silently down her cheeks. There was little she hated more than watching the people she loved hurting.

And yes – she did love Cheryl. She loved her more than anything or anyone else in the world, and she wasn't going to fight those feelings for a second longer. Life wasn't worth that. Life wasn't worth denying the people who needed to hear it most the truth.

A light tap on the shoulder was all it took to awake Toni the following morning. "You look like shit," Sweet Pea had commented bluntly as he handed her a slice of toast – unbuttered and only just crispy and golden, just the way she liked it as he'd learnt when she started stopping over at his trailer way back. It was his way of checking if she was alright, because he too had heard those sobs and soft voices early that morning and there was no missing the slightly bloodshot eyes his fellow serpent – not only that, but one of his best friends – sported. She rolled her eyes and glared at him. He told her they could stay here as long as they needed, that he'd sort the sofabed out at some point when he arrived home from school and then he left to go just there and the trailer was filled with silence once again so she closed her eyes once more, this time curled up in the corner of the couch with some hope that the more comfortable position would help her doze off.

By half ten, with maybe five hours worth of disturbed, broken up sleep, she figured that no more would be coming and with that she heaved herself off the couch, heading over to the corner of the room she'd allocated to her things and picking up a few schoolbooks and a blue biro from beneath the pile of poorly-folded clothes on the floor before placing them down on the coffee table. It was a poor attempt at avoiding the repetitive cycle of boredom and worry, and to channel those emotions into catching up on the years of schoolwork she was behind on – the only achievement she'd earned from attending Southside High.

Cheryl had lent for Serpent all of her notes for the past two years and flicking through the endless notebooks and folders it was evident which days were rougher for the girl than others. The majority of the time the words on the page were written in beautiful cursive, each letter so uniform and perfectly illustrated that it could have been easily mistaken for a typed font – the type of handwriting everybody envied. But then sometimes there would be some paragraphs of a much more heavy-handed format, occasional misspellings scribbled out in an almost angry manner.

She felt a pang to her chest when she noticed that a lot of these less tidy pages were labelled 'homework' – it was so obvious that she was hurting, and it was so obvious that the times she was hurting most of all were the times she'd she was at home. How didn't anybody notice this? How did nobody figure that she was so miserable there?

There was another week, too – on a couple of pages, only the title and the date were noted, maybe a few unfinished sentences and teacher's notes saying 'stupid mistakes' and 'focus!'. The more she stared, the more Toni began to notice how oddly familiar the dates seemed.

Early October. A hell of a lot happened in that second week, and a hell of a lot of negative things they were. October 5th was the night that FP had been arrested and she remembered it crystal clearly. Watching him walk out of his trailer handcuffed, her eyebrows furrowed in utter confusion as she tried her hardest to figure out why, how, what. For the gang that week had been perhaps the toughest they had ever encountered, or at least the toughest they'd encountered in a long time, but it was incomparable to the week the Blossom's had experienced. Two nights after FP's arrest, Clifford was discovered to be to blame after all. Just days after that the town awakened to smoke and ashes blowing from the charred skeleton of the manor, east wing completely disappearing to the flames. In the turn of a week, the Blossoms had gone from proud business owners to a merely a widow and an orphan, both of whom with their lives destroyed by the white collar criminal's blue collar ways.