Stolen Voices ✓

June 24th

"She's not here. Mara left," Elias says, somewhat bothered. He still has her phone.

"Do you know where she went? Can you find her?" Genevieve talks worriedly, her voice panicked. She sounds like she is crying, choking towards the end of her sentence. She is afraid, it is obvious by the way she pleads for him to find her.

"No, I don't," Elias utters more clearly, his own worry building in his chest. His breathing is heavier, his mind clearer as he runs to the front door. Throwing it open, Mara isn't anywhere in sight, like she doesn't want to be found.

She vanished into the morning sunlight.

"She's gone," he muttered into Mara's phone.

---

She heard him speaking to her mom, she wasn't asleep. Enraged, she feels bitter that Elias would go behind her back like that. So she goes to the only place Mara knows she could be free from it all, the one place where she can trust everyone.

Walking up the carpeted stairs her steps are slow. Her skin is slightly sunburnt from the hours she's spent just walking. By now, she is tired of the way the birds chirp and the car engines roar. Last night was the best sleep she's had in a while, and it was ruined by her mother.

Always her mother, she just never expected Elias to be in on it too.

Standing in front of the door, with the three numbers she memorized, her knuckles hovered over the wood. She shifts her backpack on her shoulders, still wearing Elias's jersey. Her hair, which was down minutes again, is now tied up into a ponytail. Mara realizes she must look like a wreck, but she doesn't care.

The voices told her to leave, they yelled it in both of her ears. So she accepted, after weeks of ignoring them, she listened. Propelling her feet forward, digging her shoes into the concrete, she went to the one place nobody would look for her. The place she always found herself when trouble arrived at her doorstep.

The dark wood door swings open, revealing a tallish boy with cocoa brown skin. His sable-toned hair is buzzed down to his scalp, his hands playing with a stud nose piercing. He looks at her crazily, blinking slowly, before a smile takes over his confused expression. His dark brown eyes, squinting at her, a deep chuckle escaping his lips.

"Mara!" She's embraced into a warm hug, pulled into the petite apartment. The smell of marijuana on Cairo's flannel instantly attacks her nose, almost calmingly.

She used to love the high when the world appeared eternally lighter. Like she could fly above it all, escape it if she had to. It had become her sanctuary, for a while at least. Until one night he found her, passed out in an alleyway.

"You bitch," a high-pitched voice rings out as she's released from the embrace. Mara smiles, looking over Cairo's shoulders. There stands a girl with short black hair and blunt bangs, her eyes lined thick with liquid liner. She isn't tall, but her proportions make her appear that way from a distance. Her torso short, her legs long and tanned.

"Hey, Ryn," Mara beams, running into her open arms. Ryn laughs, embracing Mara whose grin overtakes her features. Her head feels fuzzy with all the smog, the open windows not doing much to air the room out.

She feels instantly at home, falling into the little circle as if she never left it. None of them ever acknowledge when Mara's gone for months without a trace. How she seems more level when she comes back. They just accept her with open arms and warm smiles, back into the lifestyle that has become her addiction.

"How's my wify," a wiry arm wraps around her shoulders, pulling her into his side. She grimaces with a smirk, pushing Will away, who offers her a blunt. She takes it, filling her lungs with its euphoria, puffing it out between the slits in her lips.