Saving The Bad Boy

•6• ZOEY

Zoey

"Are you sure you guys don't want me to like, sleep on the floor or something?"  Toby pried. 

He had been trying to convince us for the past fifteen minutes that if there's a killer on the loose in the neighborhood, then we'd be safer if we all slept in one room. Macy and I felt fine on our own though. I mean, we were on the second floor and there was a lock on my door. We'd be fine.

Besides, Toby's old room, where he'd be sleeping tonight, was right beside mine. If anything happened all I had to do was yell for him.

"We're fine, Toby." I rolled my eyes as I began to shoo him out of my room.  "Goodnight."

And with that, I closed my door in his face and locked it. 

"I'm exhausted." Macy sighed as she flopped down onto my bed and got under the covers. "I'll probably be out the second it starts, but put the office on anyways."

And so I did. She was right though, she crashed within minutes of it being on. Figuring it was nearly 1:30am, you'd think I'd do the same, but my mind kept me awake. I couldn't stop thinking about the night before.

I began to wonder if Owen would talk to me once school started up and maybe give me an explanation of what happened last night. I mean, it'd only be fair.

My mind then wondered to the phone call I received earlier. Who was it? And why'd they say that?

Thinking about it sent chills down my spine. I wasn't sure if I should be afraid or just take it all with a grain of salt. All I knew was that Owen was in obvious danger and last night he'd claimed that I was putting myself in danger as well.

I wondered what have happened if I didn't open the door for him. Would he have went next door and hoped they answered or would he have bled out on my front porch and I'd find him there the next morning? Or would whoever was after him catch him and do whatever it is they seemingly wanted him for?

I mean obviously something was up. Why else would someone kill a kids dad and then try to kill them as well? Maybe his family owed someone money. Or maybe they just pissed off the wrong person. Regardless, it was crazy and terrifying to think about.

I let out a huff, deciding that thinking about it would do me no good and just put me on edge for no reason.  I needed to think about something else. 

Pulling out my phone, I started scrolling through Instagram.  My feed was full of girls on vacation and cringy couples with even more cringy captions.  Instagram was dead these days, I don't even know why I bothered with it.  But then I began to wonder if Owen had made any posts on his page yet, sending me to the search bar. 

It didn't take me more than a minute to find his account since we had so many mutuals, but just as it was before, his account was bare.  He was one of those guys that didn't even have a profile picture or bio.  How lame. 

I clicked over to his tagged photos, and contrary to what I thought, there were actually a few.  The most recent one was from months ago with a group of guys.  They were all sitting on a fancy looking car and a few of them were throwing up odd hand gestures.

I've noticed that guys in Mildred like to throw up gang symbols as though they're from the hood, even though we're a few hours away from the actual hood of Chicago.  This earned an eyeroll from me, how typical. 

My eyes began to focus in on Owen, who was on the far left side of the hood of the car, standing beside a guy who had his arm round him.  I didn't recognize who any of the guys were except for another guy from my school, Jason, who was about equal in height to Owen.