𝐋𝐔𝐃𝐈𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐒. ᵒᵘᵗᵉʳ ᵇᵃⁿᵏˢ ¹

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 56.

━ 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝗹
𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗼𝗺 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗻.

𝐇𝐔𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐒𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃 𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐒 embraced their shapes in deformation, pulsating and throbbing through the glass of the cop car window as the vehicle sped down the road, touching a bare epiphany. It was almost as though, through the fine lines of disaster, breaking free seemed like a possibility— I'd done it for too long, gotten shockingly used to running from everything. But the wheels turned none of the doubts away, heading onward towards the end of our summer, our endless summer that was thought to last forever.

    And I believed it. With a pigmented heart, I believed we could do it— we, five teenagers, could reach the highest summits of a glorifying succession, the best anyone could see. We would be the ones. Precisely, I believed every inch of every detail. To the eyes of no one but us, we were going to get the gold, and we were going to be right. But it was all an illusion— a sick, blinding, cruel illusion that made the brightest goals seem reachable. Never did we think it would end up like this.

We were told not to play with fire. Never were we told that, despite every fierce warning, it's colossally impossible to avoid the flames. It just so happened that someone grabbed our extinguisher right when we'd found ourselves on the cusp of greatness, and killed the flames with those foams, drowned all that we'd worked for into a massacre of endings. And it also just so happened that Ward Cameron's fingerprints were marked all over that fire extinguisher, at the breaking point.

Constantly as things caught up by the moment, I wondered how differently the galavant would have turned out if I hadn't met Sarah Cameron. If Kook princess hadn't almost ran me over on Figure Eight. Assuredly, John B would have figured out his father's undoing without me, in the peak of time. But without my presence in all, the comprehensive list of causes and consequences would have twisted out into a disparate denouement— and I had all the time in the world to imagine an alternate reality, a reality where John B wasn't on the Phantom heading across the border.

It was the unsureness and the frailty of my position in the whole case that made my head hurt the most. I was seen in the cop SUV back at the Chateau next to the cop-proclaimed fugitive, and something told me, that I wasn't going to get off as easily as Jj, Kiara, and Pope. And that conclusion had hit me in the very moment when the cop sirens blared over the trees at the boat ramp, and officer Shoupe had hopped out of his driver's seat, hand on gun.

It was utterly alarming to know that my facial expression hadn't changed a pinch when we had noticed the cars pulling up. For forty-eight hours consuming, I'd ran from the authorities, and in the midst of those very hours, somewhere, I had realized the end was decidedly inevitable. So when the officers piled out of their vehicles with looks of finality, I barely moved, even when Shoupe yelled and shouted into our ears, except for extending my hands beside my head. The tears flowed without a cease, landing on my shirt to create spots. The stains were still there.

Should had looked at the Pogues first, and then to the Phantom gliding through the water at it's far distance, with wide eyes, and then specifically to me. Something buzzing had flashed over Shoupe's eyes, I could see it from far, when he had recognized my appearance, and the precise remembrance of my body sitting in that runaway SUV.

When they'd shoved Jj and I into one car, Kiara and Pope in another, I couldn't hold back from letting my mind race to oblivion, like before. It was the first time I'd sat in a cop car for a felony, but yet,  I wasn't scared about the repercussions. I wasn't thinking about the charges, or the trouble, or the blames I was going to take, or the blows to the head I was going to need for closure. It all became a blur.