"I promise that I'll never fall in love with you. Cross my heart, hope to die."
"Here's to hoping."
Harper Young was sure that moving in with her aunt would be an improvement. It wasn't. This was all due to three tiny little problems.
1) Embry Call...
Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. "
- Robert A. Heinlein
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Greivances
After a couple of weeks, Harper had started to sit with Jake and Quil during lunch. This was regretted soon after when Jake couldn't stop talking about one (1) Bella Swan. He mooned over her appearance, the fact she was single, and their so-called 'connection'. Quil had laughed at the last one. He laughed until there was no sound coming out and his face had gone all red.
(Jake also touched on how he pulled her out of depressive episode which Harper had scoffed at.)
She and Quil had heard about the 'date' - it was Jake, her, and a group of Forks kids- a week before it happened. Come Monday morning the two were surprisingly ready for the details of the date.
But Jake wasn't there. At the sight of their empty half of the table, Quil paled slightly. Jake wasn't at school at all. Quil had missed him in auto shop. Occasionally he caught Embry looking at him knowingly, with a flash of pain etched onto his features. Quil blinked and the expression was gone, Embry had completely turned away from him.
Quil called him after school and it was surprisingly Billy who had answered. The elder had informed him, which he hurriedly relayed to an annoyed Harper, that Jake had mono. This usually wasn't that out of the question when fraternizing with the Forks kids but on the rez, mono had a different connotation. Why? Because Jared had mono. Paul had mono. Embry had mono. Dread punched their guts each and every day he was gone. He returned the next Monday.
There was an explosive silence that settled over the two of them when Harper spotted him sitting beside Embry with a wide smile stretched over his face at whatever joke Jared had shared. He looked like them. Muscles rippling underneath the thin tee shirts, standing tall and broad-shouldered, cropped hair, and a tattoo on his bicep. Quil pursed his lips and tried not to cry over the frustration of his friends leaving him. Harper tugged Quil to the library that day and they ended up sitting in the corner cursing Sam Uley, his disciples, and Quil's ex-best friends.
They had started to hang out more when Harper had realized how lost Quil looked without his two friends. It wasn't that he entirely relied on them to exist. He relied on them for support, as friends. They were supposed to stick together. Friends don't leave abruptly and stop talking to you without giving a reason.
They went to Sage's funeral together when the chief of police, Charlie Swan, made it clear that there were no leads on Sage's case. Both of her parents shed tears and the sinking feeling in their gut told them that Sage was gone. It's funny how people just know. The sinking sense of dread, it's merely intuition that they just knew Sage no longer had a heartbeat.
