Begin (COMPLETED)

Chapter 21- Stay

All of them get up to run except Alex, who remains calmly seated on his bucket.

"Get up, come on! We need to get out of here!" Poppy yells, pulling on his arm as hard as she can.

"You guys do realize that running away is incredibly suspicious and would get us in trouble way faster than if we just stayed here and acted natural, right? You know that we can't outrun the Shadows. No one ever gets away. You know that. Just act natural." He replies, inspecting his nails.

"There's no way that that would actually work," Sidney shouts, "Don't make me shove you off of that bucket. Let's go! It's not safe for us here. The Shadow is coming."

"Too late," Alex whispers with a smile, the Shadow walking quickly towards them.

"Why the hell would you do that?"

Alex doesn't answer but instead chooses to watch as the Shadow looks all of them up and down, examining their paint covered clothes. A black helmet hides the Shadow's face, obscuring where their eyes would normally be. Only their mouth and chin shows as a reminder that they're still human, but no one can ever tell if the person is male or female.

"Excuse me," it says in an altered voice, somehow foreign and human at the same time.

"Yes, officer..?" Sidney says, taking the lead.

"What are you doing on private property covered in..." It pauses, refusing to give them its real name. Instead it just stands there, looking at them suspiciously.

"This? Oh, it's nothing. Just a..."

"Just what?" The officer demands, already reaching for its weapon.

"An accident!" Noah pipes up, pushing his way past the others to get to the front. "I was getting paint out of my brush, you see... and well, I spilt it all over them if you can't tell."

"Is that so?"

"Yes," Noah says sheepishly, his cheeks a bright red. "It's all my fault," He proudly declares, ready to take the fall for their mistake.

"Then why are you all covered in two different colors of paint?" The officer asks, not buying it.

"Because!" Poppy yells, standing next to her brother. "Because I knocked over a paint bucket in my hurry to get the job done. It's my fault too!"

"How are you all covered in it?" The officer's fingers quiver by its hip where the gun lies.

"That's because I..." Alex begins, desperately trying to come up with a plausible excuse. "I slipped in the paint and knocked Jordan over."

"And I...uh..." Jordan says, joining the group confronting the officer. "I fell."

"What a brilliant observation," The Shadow mutters sarcastically. "And the rest of you?"

"Well," Alwin whimpers, his hands shaking. "I tripped over those two idiots trying to save some of the paint."

Riley pushes past Alwin and enters the conversation, saying, "And I lost my balance when I dropped my brush."

"When you dropped your brush, huh?" The Shadow laughs, a deep chuckle that shakes its ribs and curves its lips into a barbed wire smile.

"Yeah! And um... if you're going to punish Noah, you're gonna punish the rest of us too!"

The officer pauses, looking at the ragtag group before him, each one defiant in their own unique way. Alwin still shakes with what could be either fury or fear, perhaps even a mix of both. Alex stands as tall as he physically can, his back straight and his arms crossed. Poppy leans against him, a fake smile painted on her face with a sharpie that's run out of ink. It's smeared, sinking into the crevices of her skin and twisting like a restless snake. Sidney quivers, a restless bow in his back instead of his spine. Riley is the only confident one, her eyes flashing and daring the officer to challenge her. Only Jordan is numb to the situation, watching with the wide eyes of a deer caught in a car's headlights.

"I can't help but wonder," She thinks as the officer begins writing on his trusty pad, always kept in his left pocket. "Why did everyone stand up for each other? Did we make it worse or did we make it better? I mean, could we have gotten away with this if we had ran like Sidney told us to? Would we have been captured or even... no, I'm not going to think about that. Not today, not ever.

"Should we have listened to Sidney or Alex? Hell, does it even matter? Alex had a good point. Could we really have escaped? And even then, what would we do after that? Where would we run? Where could we go? What would we have had to leave behind, all for some spilt paint? What would I have left behind?

"My trailer. The notebook. My parents' notebook. God, my tapes. All of those songs that you can't find anymore. It's so sad I can't even remember where they came from. Just one day, all I can remember is that they were there. Sitting in that chair by the table. I don't know who made them, who wrote the titles on their labels. Maybe it was my parents. Hell, maybe I did. Does any of it even matter?

"Instead of leaving behind reminders, I'm leaving behind memories. I'm glad I didn't run. I'm glad we stayed to face the consequences. I'm so glad we stayed."

The officer clears his throat to get their undivided attention. Apparently everyone was lost in their own world while Jordan was daydreaming. Its pad is covered in handwriting and notes. Red ink stains the page and Jordan almost cries out as the paper is ripped from the pad in a quiet scream.

"So..." Riley says, the only one brave enough to speak. "Are we in trouble?"