» à deux // luke hemmings « [editing]

18

sympathique - pink martini

[Ivey bc everyone's mad at Ivey]

“Luke lied to you.” Alice frowned, looking up from the bagel she was picking on in the bus’s kitchen.

I left Ashton in his bunk in the middle of a heated make out session. Luke’s words hit me right there and then, my mind fully understanding what he told me. I didn’t know what I was doing when I got mad at Luke; my first impulse was to offend him because he offended me. I acted before thinking, what’s new.

Next thing I knew, I was rambling to Alice and Jackie about Luke in the living room area. They were thankfully alone.

“What are you talking about?” I sat down on the leather couch across Jackie.

Jackie cleared her throat but kept her mouth shut. She looked at Alice.

“You were with Jack in the car when he crashed.” She said slowly. “You guys were fighting and it got out of hand.”

“I thought we broke up, or whatever.” I tried to recall everything that Luke told me.

Jackie shook her head but stayed quiet and allowed Alice to do all the talking. “You guys remained friends, of course. I mean, how can you not when he’s Ashton’s brother, right?”

All I did was nod.

“You were fighting and he told you to shut up and right after he said that, you guys crashed. That’s why you stopped talking.” Alice avoided eye contact by playing with a banana she got from a nearby fruit basket.

“I don’t understand, why would Luke lie to me about this?” I scoffed, not fully believing in her. Or Luke.

Both Alice and Jackie shrugged. “We didn’t know how to explain the accident to you, so we made a bunch of different versions of what happened. We decided to just tell you that you got into a car accident with Jack and leave the rest of the details a secret from you because we didn’t want to make things worse. He probably just wanted to add drama into the accident, or whatever.”

“I’m in a bus full of liars.” I groaned, too worn out to get angry. I looked at the window behind me, trying to decipher where we were. “I need to smoke this out, when are we stopping?”

“Stop smoking.” Alice mumbled.

“I’ll do what I want.” I snapped. “Tuffy! I need a stopover!” I called to the direction of the driver’s seat. I heard a grunt of approval.

“Smoking is terrible for your body, you know.” Jackie finally spoke.

“Yeah, then I’ll die from smoking and all of you can make up some lie about my death, too.”

--

I went to my bunk to get a pack of cigarettes when we finally stopped at a gas station and found a shoebox resting underneath my pillow. It somehow looked familiar, but I couldn’t determine exactly why. I opened it with curiosity and found a piece of wrinkled paper with Luke’s handwriting scrawled all over it. I threw it back in the container without reading, and put the shoebox back where I found it.

“Ivey? We only have a few minutes for this stop!” Ashton called from the front of the bus. Everyone else was checking out some shops nearby while I smoked behind the gasoline station’s shop.

I ran to the front and followed Ashton while adjusting the beanie on my head. He brought us behind the store and pointed to a clean spot on the cemented ground. We sat together in silence and I immediately lit my cigarette.