I know I have to get back on the trail of figuring out what happened to Chance, so I spent hours staring at the Post-it notes of reasons last night, fighting against the sleeping pills. I read and re-read them until the words blurred together and my eyes itched with fatigue.
I wake up a changed man.
It feels like my concussion has cleared overnight, and my hair even lies flat when I comb it after a quick cold shower. I try to be positive, even when it starts pissing it down outside.
Mum gives me a lift to school; I'm still milking my concussion to avoid walking or getting on the grotty bus.
As I stride into the corridor and make my way over to my locker, I'm so unaware of the surroundings that I bump straight into someone.
"Uh, sorry..." I shake my head, moving to step away from them.
"Rory..." It's Heather. Her face is bleached of its usual creamy façade of perfection, and her hair is neither poker-straight nor curled; it hangs in the balance.
"Heather," I echo her, rolling my eyes and walking around her.
Across the corridor, I see Max leaning against the lockers, with arms folded and eyebrows tightened in discontent. I glance over my shoulder to see that Heather's following me to my locker like a lost puppy.
I ignore her as I grab a maths textbook out of my locker and shove it in my bag.
Lilia joins Max, but neither of them makes a move to help me out. I guess Max is trying to keep his distance from Heather since she likes him — and since he clearly doesn't swing that way. And I guess Lilia is trying to stay out of the fucked-up love quadrilateral — which becomes a triangle without Chance.
I'd rather it stay a messy quadrilateral than become a permanent triangle without Chance.
"What do you want, Heather?" I seethe at her.
"I want to help," she insists — with a foreign tone of determinism that I've never heard from her before.
Freezing in my actions, I turn to look at her head-on.
Passion and empathy paint her face; emotions that I didn't know Heather Towers was actually possible of. As far as I was concerned, before this conversation, Heather had the emotional range of indifference and spitefulness, and that was it.
"You want to help me get books out of my locker?" I raise an eyebrow at her, refusing to allow my guard to drop.
She's wrong if she thinks I'll just forget about the way she treated Chance.
"I want to help find out what happened to Chance," she proclaims fiercely. "I went and sat with her last night, and the doctors told me that the only reason she's being kept in a coma is because of this head trauma that happened before the waterfall. So, there was something else — some final thing that sent her over the edge."
Frowning at her, I tilt my head, remembering what she told us at Chance's car crash site. "Do you remember what happened when you bumped into her before that night?"
She swallows and pales, shaking her head quickly. "No... Like I told you, I was wasted."
"Well then, if you ever remember any of that night, come and find me then," I tell her harshly, not letting her get close enough to hurt me like she hurt Chance.
"I want to help now, though," Heather speaks again before I can turn away.
"Why?" I direct at her.
"Because I'm probably one of the reasons Chance felt like she couldn't have a future? Because I treated her like shit for years, just because I was homophobic."
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Concerning Chance ✔
قصص عامةThey keep telling me that I should just let her go, let that night rest and move on with my life. They don't realise that I still wake up in the middle of the night, sobbing for Chance and sobbing for myself and sobbing for the fucked-up world with...
