The October Malice ༄ (gxg)

ten, protected

Sam's outward did not quite match her inward.

Outward, it was all "bad girl" with leather jackets who vandalized the local bridge on weekdays and partied with her buddies on the weekends. She could shotgun an extra large beer can in three seconds, and there's been more than one time that she's had a run-in with the police.

The police were not Sam's favorite choice of company. In eighth grade, when she was still innocent and not yet morphed into a rebellious teen, her dad was sent to prison for three years for stealing a car part. The thing was that his car had broken down, and he needed a particularly expensive part to fix it or else he couldn't drive to his job out of town—they could not rely on Sam's mother's paycheck alone.

So he was sent to prison for grand theft and, upon getting into a brawl with one of the prison guards, was served two more years. The system was almost as easy to get permanently sucked into as Deliverance was.

But the thing that made her hate cops the most was not that her dad had been arrested by them—it was because one of the local cops had raped her mother and only got suspended from his job for six months before being allowed to return, all the while her father was sitting in jail for five years just for taking something that he desperately needed to live.

The system was rigged, and that's why Sam became who she was. In her freshman and sophomore year of high school, things got really bad. It started with smoking and drinking, then weed, and then she fell into the underground drug system in the town where one would least expect it. The few local dealers were enough to drug up Sam and her other druggie friends. She ended up having to redo her sophomore year because of how bad it got, but that was when Opal came along.

Opal Indick was her saving grace.

They'd been acquaintances their entire lives since their moms were best friends, but when something between them finally clicked, Sam fell harder than she had ever fallen into anything. Opal was the one who got her off the drugs, out of depression, and into a better future. She wholeheartedly believed that she would have been dead if it had not been for the blonde who warmed her heart and melted her iciness.

That's why when a cop car cruised around the corner of the college parking lot as her and Opal were walking to class, her entire body tensed with both rage and fear. She stared hard at the car with the white middle and the black front and end, a row of unlit lights sitting atop it.

The windows were too dark to see which local cop was driving, but she feared it would be him, the same cop who had raped her own mother. There'd been more than one occasion that he found her walking somewhere on the street and slowed down, rolling his window down to sneer at her. She could always hear his mocking laughter as she sprinted as fast as she could away from his car, and sometimes he would even speed up and begin chasing her.

She had not even been aware of how hard she was tensing until she felt a cold hand take her fist in its own, and when she felt Opal's shoulder lean against hers, the tension suddenly melted away all at once. She let out a breath as the cop passed by them and turned to her left to be met with those soothing green eyes.

"It's okay," Opal spoke, pressing her cheek against the shoulder of Sam's leather jacket, keeping her eyes staring up at hers.

Opal never had to say very much to calm her down. Sam only nodded, turning her eyes to the sidewalk as she tried to push down every memory and emotion swirling inside her like an incessant maelstrom.

"What did you do yesterday?" Sam casually asked, trying to change the conversation to something that would settle her mind; but she was also curious as to why her girlfriend had went M.I.A.