Survival

16. Avoidance and the Inevitable

Apparently, the world could still exist after the realization Stephanie had been subjected to the night before. Numbly, with her head filled with a strange surreal sensation, she sat in the popular café on the corner that she came to acknowledge as a kind of sanctuary. It had been a couple of days since she’d last eaten there, but after what had happened the night before, she couldn’t quite wrap her head around eating breakfast with the Seymours.

In the early hours of the morning, she had escaped the confines of the house, knowing full well that they’d hear her leave no matter what she did to mask her grand exit. The thought nearly made her skin crawl.

“Haven’t seen you here in a while,” Mrs. King observed, hand on her hip. “Thought you’d skipped town.”

Stephanie couldn’t bite back the grin tempting her lips. “Good morning,” she greeted, and skillfully ignored the implication in the older woman’s phrasing.

“Oh, I may be old, child, but I’ve got more than a little intuition still left in me,” warned the waitress with a knowing look. “Don’t think I missed that you’re on your own, and too young to be.”

“I’m not alone.”

The words were out of Stephanie’s mouth on instinct, and it took her a second to catch up with it. God, and she really wasn’t alone, either. Not anymore. Not by any definition of the word. Once again, she shied away from the thought.

“I mean, I’m staying with people now.” Stephanie picked up the fallen pieces of her façade and plastered them back onto her face.

Mrs. King cocked an eyebrow. “Doesn’t mean you’re not alone anymore,” she said simply. “But at least they’ve put some more weight on you, even if it’s just a little bit.”

Stephanie was at a loss for words. What did the old woman mean? Of course she wasn’t alone, not now. The world was more than just Stephanie and her secrets now.

Mrs. King strode away. Elbows on her table, Stephanie felt a familiar weight wrapping around her heart.

Or was it?

The previous night's events played behind her eyelids, haunting her night and day.

In silent shock, Miranda and Jonathon allowed both recently-turned teenagers to go upstairs and change (in more ways than one) before they were to return back downstairs for yet another of those talks that the family seemed to love so much.

Stephanie's heart was way past her throat; she could swear that she felt it throbbing in her head, a constant, erratic sign that time was indeed passing. Daniel's eyes flickered toward her, showing more emotion than Stephanie had ever imagined possible for the guarded boy. It was really too bad that that emotion was shock.

Feeling eerily like an animal in a zoo, being gawked at by people for far too long, Stephanie ignored Daniel's presence and escaped upstairs. As soon as she crossed the threshold of her guest room, all of the fury and frustration in her body melted into the ground. The crossover between animal and human hurt more than usual, grinding at her bones and pulling at her skin in a thousand and one ways.

The tumultuous rage of feelings in her caused this, she knew, her indecision, and ultimately her confusion, harming the process.

By the time she had returned to her own skin, she was shaking where she stood, and pulling on clothes sapped the rest of her energy reserves. Disregarding the invitation to come back downstairs, she crawled into bed.

The hot tears that escaped from her tightened eyelids burned her sensitive skin, and even the soft sheets of the bed lay uncomfortably along her. Anguish tore at the wounds in her chest, the bittersweet memories of her own pack. In the end, Stephanie could not persuade herself to get back up.