fast car | STEVE HARRINGTON [2]

22. lady and the tramps

They didn't know yet about Steve. She couldn't bring herself to repeat the situation out loud. They could tell something was wrong, but knew to give her space until she came to them first.

"What do you mean suspended?" Julia demanded, prompting Ringo to edge further down the hallway at the revelation.

"It was Mitch Ashford again!" Sunny defended, the surname of the perpetrator left Ringo's lips parted in shock. Daniel Ashford's little brother was the one giving Sunny grief at school?

"That little shit," Julia swore, huffing in exasperation before slamming what sounded like a letter onto the dining table. "What did he do this time?"

"He..." Sunny hesitated, sounding nervous - for one of the first times since she had been introduced to their family. "He tried to sneak his Polaroid under my skirt when I wasn't looking."

Ringo felt like she was going to be sick. And not from the alcohol.

"What...? Why would he do that?" Julia asked almost in a whisper, complete and utter horror laced through her tone of voice.

"I don't want to say..." the youngest family member denied.

"Sunny," Julia soothed, placing a comforting hand on her adopted daughter's shoulder. "You're safe here. You can tell me anything, you know I'll always be on your side no matter what. Even if you did something wrong, but I know that in this case you did nothing."

"He said-... he said that his brother had told him some stuff about... about Ringo," Sunny admitted uncomfortably, leaving Ringo herself starting to shake with a mix of anger and shame. Over three years ago those pictures had been taken, against her will, and they were still coming back to haunt her. Teenage boys never truly did understand the power they held to ruin a woman's life.

"And he said that he wanted to see how different I looked because we weren't real sisters," she continued.

Those words were all it took to spark a chain reaction that evening. Julia, without hesitation, scrambled to grab for her car keys from the kitchen counter, determined to give the Ashford parents a piece of her mind. This was not going to continue or happen ever again.

But Ringo had beat her to it, leaving the front door wide open as she took off in a full blown sprint down their street with one destination in mind.

"Ringo!" Julia's voice echoed down the otherwise empty street when she noticed her eldest daughter had taken off, clearly having heard about the ordeal. "Shit!" Swears fell from the mother's lips as she gathered herself and got into her car, vowing Sunny that she would be home soon and this would all be over.

Angry tears swiped at Ringo's cheeks, whipping away almost instantly by the gusts of wind firing against her skin from the speed she was racing down the street. Her legs ached and her chest was on fire, but she was fuelled by the sheer anger pumping through her veins. All of her sadness and anxiety had transferred into a new emotion she was all too familiar with in the past - anger. Anger the Ashford family was going to feel the wrath of that night.

Throwing all manners to the wind as soon as she landed at the house, bitterly eyeing the pristine garden that had won 'Hawkins Garden Of The Year' a month prior, she harshly rapped her knuckles against the pine of the front door.