This isn't weird.

Stranded

With a startled flail, Millie kicked over the soda bottle, sending the last of her ginger ale fizzing across the asphalt. She grabbed for it with a strange, confusing guilt—why was her face wet with tears for Noah, of all people? The whole point of this exercise was to punish herself with thoughts of Ben, damn it. It gave her a sick feeling of disloyalty.

"Oh! Oh, you're crying, what's wrong?"

Before she knew what was happening, her face was buried in a haze of white-gold, and a delicate, flowery scent filled her lungs, though the set of arms that was suddenly around her were clamped too tight for her to draw in a full breath. Her first instinct was to struggle, to shove the stranger away and run, but something stronger compelled her to stay, a desperation just beneath the surface she'd refused to acknowledge for days.

Damn it, Millie needed a hug.

So she fell limp, leaning into a soft, foreign shoulder that smelled like gardenias and jasmine, and bawled. "There, there, it's alright. Let it out," the stranger whispered, running her fingers through Millie's hair. Her voice was breathy and girlish, sweet as her perfume, and brimming with sincerity.

Several minutes passed before Millie's sobs began to taper off, and when she began to pull away, a pair of slender thumbs caressed her face from the bridge of her nose, out toward her temples, brushing away the last of her tears.

The eyes looking back at her were an eerily pale shade of translucent blue. They were large in proportion to her face, wide set and round in a way that made her resting expression a look of wonder, with long, fair eyelashes the same white blond as the evenly parted hair that fell over her shoulders and all the way down to the curb they were sitting on. Her skin was fair enough to make even Millie's seem tan by comparison, smooth and unblemished, with a natural flush effused over her cheeks and the tip of her nose. Wearing a white dress, with the sun at her back lighting up her hair, she looked angelic enough at first glance to make Millie wonder if Stanley from Maryland had serial killed her after all, and the girl in front of her had appeared to escort her off to her final judgment.

"Doesn't that feel better?" the girl asked with a smile. "I love crying. It makes you feel so much like yourself, doesn't it?" She gave Millie another hug, this one gentler. "You look so lost. Are you stranded?"

Millie nodded.

"My friends and I could give you a ride," the girl said. "Where are you going?"

Opening her mouth to reply, another sob escaped, and Millie tried to hide her face once again. But the girl caught her chin, and tilted it back up to look at her. "Don't you have anywhere to go?"

Millie shook her head.

"Oh. Well, come with us, then!" the girl said brightly. Seeing Millie's confused expression, she explained, "We're going to California. There's a music festival coming up. We're making an adventure out of it." She seemed to interpret the silence as acceptance of her invitation, and she rose to her feet, taking Millie's hands to pull her up, as well. She was willowy, much taller than Millie, but also much younger—eighteen or nineteen, maybe, in that transitional stage of technical adulthood unburdened by life experience.

Wobbling on her feet, Millie finally choked out a few words. "You—You don't know me."

"Not yet," the girl replied, nodding as though she were agreeing with something quite profound. "What's your name?"

Millie felt another swell of that craving for anonymity she had felt when introducing herself to Stanley, and the lie came out this time without missing a beat. "Kathy."

The girl's naturally wide eyes widened yet more, a smile spreading over her face, and she laughed. "How funny!" she said. "My name is Kathleen."

Well, shit. Millie made a note: next time she lied about her name to a stranger, get their name first.