Rayston Point Road || Editing

Chapter Thirty-Four

I hadn't had the chance to grab my car keys, leaving me to wander down the Rayston Point Road on foot, hyperaware of the traffic on the main road, even in the early mornings of a Saturday. My desire to be left alone and not found veered me left, my feet quickly taking me down the path that I had surprisingly memorized after the trips I had taken down the same road in Isaac's car. The ground beneath my feet eventually turned uneven, from pavement to pebbles to dirt. The overgrowth of trees above my head blocking what little sunlight periodically shone through the accumulating clouds as I walked through the woods in solitude until I found myself along the edge of the marshes.

The patches of grass sprouting through the dirt and along the edges of the rock were still damp with early morning dew, showers having passed through the night that threatened to return with the dark skies above, but I sat anyways, not caring about the likely stains that would end up on my white dress.

On the ground, I leaned back against the rock, letting my head drop back as I closed my eyes. With nothing but the sound of the forest rippling around me as the wind picked up speed and the animals that I still hadn't grown accustomed to hearing, I let out a heavy sigh. I set my phone on my crossed ankles, twisting my fingers around each other as my mind replayed everything I had said to Leighton, and everything she had said to me.

When New Year's Eve happened, Leighton had been the first person I had called, burdened by dozens of emotions that I couldn't pinpoint and forced away as much as possible as I hid behind the locked door of my bedroom while my mom paid off Nolan's parents so they wouldn't call the cops and press charges. Despite having six-month old twins, she stayed on the phone with me all night, both of us waiting until I either fell asleep or was forced to confront my mother. Neither of which happened that night, as it took nearly an entire week before my mother even looked in my direction, and another few days after that before she finally unleashed her fury at what had happened, or at least what she believed had happened. Our versions of the truth were wildly different, but she refused to listen to me, having bought into Nolan's story and the lies he and his parents spun the night she paid them off.

I spent weeks hiding out at Bailee's after that night, relying on her and my sisters as Nolan gradually turned the rest of our friends against me in an effort to save face, until it became useless for me to even attempt to defend myself anymore. Nolan had gotten to everyone first, slowly edging me out until the rumors spiraled far beyond even what was remotely close to the truth, and I was left with only one person in the city who both knew me and believed me.

It was that isolation of my friends, the breaking of my already flimsy relationship with my mother, the anger I felt that outweighed anything else, that lead to the series of events that occurred over the next few months that continued to throw my life off balance.

Instead of returning to Columbia at the end of January with a focus on my academics, I found my time more invested in doing everything I could to forget about what happened over the break, to forget about what was happening at home, eventually leading me to become a version of the person my mother saw in me.

In a moment of desperation in February, just days before my birthday, that lead me to reach out to my father, the only contact information I had for him being the numbers for the headquarters of the company he owned. His response, a brief email sent out from his phone a week later, only furthered the loneliness and devastation I was feeling.

By the time I had clawed myself to the end of the semester in May and barely scraped through my finals, ending with one of the deans summoning me to his office, an older man I had a vague memory of meeting at an event long before my dad left us, to warn me about what would happen if I didn't perform better in the fall, I was desperate to get away. That night, I haphazardly packed my bags with as much as I could to survive me the summer. The next morning, I was awake before my mother could stop me, in the car to Georgia.

Georgia, where I thought my sister's faith in me about what happened that night with Nolan and her understanding of my fractured relationship with my mother and the fresh wound of my father's email, would help me get over it. Where I thought the physical distance would also provide me with the necessarily emotional distance to try to heal from the last five months, time and space allowing me to start over.

Instead, Leighton and I had spent most of the summer butting heads, the realization finally landing that somehow she had stopped believing me about what happened with Nolan, and that she had started to see me in the same light my mother did. Instead, Isaac Verano wormed his way in, making it impossible for me to forget about what had happened with his constant pestering to know, with his ability to make me afraid to tell someone new because of how everyone else I cared about had reacted, with his unintended consequence of making my unattached summer increasingly harder to leave.

These thoughts raced through my mind, crashing and colliding with each other, pulling at each other for space at the front of my mind, resurfacing the pain I had endured over the last few months, tumbling through the rage I still felt at the people who had left me behind, including my own family, waring with each other and fueling the range of emotions I felt, startled from me only by an outside force.

A clap of thunder, startlingly loud and close, both physically made me jump and instantly distracted me from my thoughts. I opened my eyes, realizing that in the time they had been closed as my mind whirled, the sky overhead had darkened significantly. Over the marshes, in the distance, a flash of lightening bolted to the ground.

I pushed myself to my feet, quickly scrolling through the contacts of my phone until I found a name of somebody who could come pick me up, somebody that I could tolerate seeing.

As I started to make my way back to the gate, I held my phone to my ear, crossing my other arm over my chest as the wind picked up around me, surprisingly cool, and the sound of intermittent rain drops landing on the trees above me caught my ears.

"I need you to come get me."

It took only the briefest of explanations as to where I was before the line went dead with a promise to be there as quickly as possible. I tucked my phone under my arm as I kept walking, another boom of thunder seemed to shake the trees and the ground around me, the rain picking up overhead enough to break through the foliage and land on my skin.

By the time I made it to the gate, it was raining more steadily, and even as I stood underneath the trees, enough broke through the branches to mat my hair against my forehead and seep through the top of my dress. By the time Andie pulled up, drops were trailing their way down my shoulders, and the dash to Andie's car only caught more rain against my skin and in the stitches of my dress. I was shivering in her car with the air conditioning on, and as the bumps rose over my skin, she reached over to turn it down.

"What are you doing out here, Loren?" she asked softly, turning towards me in the driver's seat. She was wearing her glasses again, hair piled high on her head, wearing cotton shorts and a t-shirt that looked as if it probably belonged to Connor. I briefly wondered if she had been with him before I called.

"I-" The syllable hardly left my lips, a mumbled sound before I stopped, turning my eyes from the rain pouring on the windshield to Andie's eyes, steady on my face and unwavering with concern, and I sighed. As we sat on the dirt road with the thunder echoing above us and the rain hammering on the roof and windows, I told her everything.