WARNING homophobic slurs are used in this chapter (as sparingly as possible but still present; if you're sensitive to this sort of content please reconsider reading this, your mental health is more important than a wattpad fanfic
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Two weeks.
Two weeks of waking up early to deliver papers, two weeks of her mother dragging her to her father's sermons, and two weeks of begrudgingly avoiding her friends.
Eddie was basically in solitary confinement after coming back from the hospital. Mike was - understandably - MIA as well, and Stan had finally busied himself with his bar mitzvah. Ben, Chris had come to realize, was much too nice to properly hold a grudge. They had run into each other in a record store not too long after The Split, while she was buying the latest Alice Cooper album (and he seemed to be hiding what looked like a New Kids On The Block album). He had given her nothing more than a nod and a half-smile, which she returned. She couldn't say the same for Richie. She felt immensely bad for pushing him around as soon as she got home, but as soon as they saw each other in a Freese's one weekend they were locked in a glaring war any chance they got.
But Bill and Bev weren't as bad. They had called her (and vice versa) once or twice, but there was no point in coming up with a game plan. Beverly was right, if they didn't do this together, they wouldn't be able to do anything at all.
She let out a soft exhale as she rounded a corner of a sidewalk, passing by a telephone pole with the latest missing poster flapping in the wind. Matthew Clements, age 7, was last seen playing on his front lawn. Her jaw clenched, looking down at the ground as she walked her bike back home. These kids weren't even making the front page anymore.
Walking into the foyer, she could hear her mother shuffling about in the kitchen.
"Hey, hon," she said as she poured freshly brewed coffee into a mug. She sounded like she was in one of her 'reasonable' moods. Rare. "Want some eggs? They're gonna get cold."
"Sure." Chris replied, hanging her empty bag on the rack by the door.
Hearing her mother scrape scrambled eggs onto a plate, she was about to kick off her shoes before the phone started to ring. Mrs. Oakley answered.
"Who's this?" there was a pause. There was a minuscule change in her mother's expression, like she had just bitten into a lemon.
"Who is it?" Chris asked innocently.
Her eyes flickered over Chris before turning her back to her. "She's busy."
"Is it for me?" Not getting any sign of an answer, her mouth quirked to the side.
Chris walked over to her with her arms crossed, leaning close to the phone's receiver before her mother could move it out of her reach. "Whoever it is, I'm right here."
