Daring The Delinquents

Chapter 5 🗝️Ryans POV🗝️

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                      Ivy's dress
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I hated every moment of this. I had spent the last week trying to pretend that my family wasn't a broken mess but it wasn't working and by now I was completely and utterly sick of it.

My mother looked at me before looking away again, grabbing yet another bottle of vodka and disappearing to her bedroom with it. This was normal. My Mum drank, my Dad vanished and I left.

Before Amanda died everything  was happy. All of my memories were the four of us, Amanda, Mum, Dad and of course, me. But one day she killed herself... And it was my fault. It was all because I thought I was in love with Whitney. I chose some girl over flesh and blood. And it cost me my sister's life. I felt the familiar anger simmer inside of me and I knew I had to go get it out by one of the only two ways I knew.

1. Take it out on someone else
Or,
2. Go running and risk the emotions that told me to just keep running and never come back.

Neither option was easy for me and yet the decision was already made. I couldn't take it out on anyone else. If there was one thing Amanda's death had taught me it was that you have no idea what goes on inside someone's head. Instantly my mind switched to thoughts of Ivy. The sweet, innocent girl I had kissed almost two days ago.

I shook the thoughts off me and grimly went to go out on my running gear. I couldn't afford to think of Ivy. She was a distraction and I couldn't allow myself a distraction. Besides, she was probably going through the hardest time in her life having her mum die and I didn't want to make anything worse. I was already responsible for one suicide and I'd be damned before I became responsible for another.

Jamming my feet into my sneakers I ran out of the front door and down the street. I had no idea where I was going but that didn't faze me, I just needed to blow off steam and running did that for me. With every ponding footstep I took I thought of another memory of Amanda, another time when I took her for granted.

I should have known from the start. The sadness in her eyes even when she smiled, the dark humour and the jokes about death. The way she told me that when she died she didn't want me to cry at her funeral. It was a silent plea for help that I ignored.

I heard the ringing of an alarm somewhere in the back of my hearing and I slowed to a stop. The alarm was loud and blaring and I knew what it was. A fire alarm. A schools fire alarm.

I remembered what Ivy had told me about her school and if I remembered correctly it was the only one in the area, which meant she was in the school that was currently blaring it's cry of fire across the neighbourhood. I didn't see any smoke but that didn't mean anything.

Suddenly my thoughts were dominated completely by the small girl I had talked to yesterday. From the way her brown hair tumbled over her shoulders to her intoxicating smell of vanilla and cinnamon, I was addicted.

And in that moment I knew that I couldn't possibly walk away from that school. Ivy would be in there and for all I know she could be dead, dying, wounded...

I didn't even realise I had started running until something-no- someone crashed into my side, causing us both to fall over and roll a couple times until I saw the girl who had fallen on top of me.

"Hey there Ivy!" I said cheerfully and her soft cheeks went pink, I was so glad she wasn't in that school I didn't care about the slightly strange position we were in or the fact that the wind was biting into my bare arms. But I did care that Ivy's face was stained with tears and her white blouse was also wet. "You ok sweetheart?" I asked her softly and a stray tear fell from her eye which she hastily wiped off before Rolling away from me and sitting close but not to close.