dedicated to honestcritiques for her very sweet review of this book! thanks love <3
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A/N: i planned on posting this next week, but BB hit #15 on Mystery/Thriller and I wanted to thank all of you for your support! Also, i have no intention of casting any of the characters BUT i came across this actress while watching a show and I was like SHIT, this girl looks exactly like how i imagine Blaire to look like. So, yeah. Her name's Natalia Dyer :) Check her out if you wanna, though idk about her personality, she just reminds me of Blaire face-wise.
- - -
YEAR: 2016
"KADE! KADENCE," BRAXTON pants in an effort to catch up with her. He's never been athletic or even sporty, unlike Maverick and the other boys in their little circle. Until now, he's never really understood why he's allowed to sit at That Middle Table. But hey, he's not complaining.
She turns around, short hair flicking. When she sees that it's him, her eyes narrow the slightest. For a moment, he thinks she's going to turn around, like she always does.
Instead, she stops and folds her arms, eyes averted.
"Hey," he says with a small smile.
"What do you want?" she asks pointedly.
He falters a little, but continues anyway. "I, uh, was wondering whether you're going tonight."
"I am," she replies curtly. "Are you?"
Braxton scratches his arm. "Yeah, about that, I was hoping we could talk...?"
Kadence's eyes soften just the slightest, but harden again, almost immediately. "Talk?" she looks at her watch and frowns. "Right, my last class ended late and I'm kind of in a hurry. I still need to walk to my house to get my car. Maybe later, okay?"
She turns to leave, but Braxton grasps her forearm. "Wait. Look, can I drive you? I'm not busy and I really need to talk to you."
She stares at him blankly, mutely. He lets go, positive that he just ruined any chance with Kadence Gaardner. He opens his mouth to apologize, to promise to leave her be. He knows that their time has passed, even if it was just two days. But before he can say a word, she says, "Yeah. Sure."
Heart thumping against his chest, he grins and walks her to his car. Wordlessly, she slides into the seat beside him.
Braxton presses his lips together, trying to stop himself from smiling. It's the first time in a long time that the two of them have been alone, and this close. Ever since Blaire died and the rift in their group grew, he barely exchanged a word with Kadence. Of course, he tried to. He would text her and Snapchat her once in awhile, especially since she completely avoided him in school. Even then, he got no reply, or sometimes a one-word reply if he was really lucky.
"What did you want to talk about?" Kadence asks, breaking his train of thought.
"Huh?" he asks, looking at her through the mirror. "Oh, right. I don't - I don't think it's right for us to meet with Greyson."
Through his peripheral vision, he sees her quirk an eyebrow. "Once upon a time, she was our friend too, y'know," she replies smoothly.
"Was she? Like, sure, she sat with us. Hung out with us. Talked to us. But to anyone other than Blaire, was she really a friend?"
Kadence doesn't say anything. He sees her wringing her hands uncomfortably, and staring out the window. He knows his question struck a blow, because before Greyson tried to become someone else and went all crazy, Kadence and Greyson were close.
"All I'm saying is that it's weird that she comes back here on the day that Blaire died, dressed like Blaire, talking like Blaire, inviting us all out like Blaire did."
Kadence snorts. "So, what? Blaire rose from the dead and inhabited Greyson's body? I'm not at all pleased about her showing up here, with our history and all. But that doesn't mean that we should shun her out. Maybe her going off to rehab changed her. Maybe she just wants to hang out. I mean, when was the last time we all hung out, right?"
She stops talking suddenly, and he's sure it's because she remembers the last time they hung out - all of them. Before Blaire died. Before Greyson left. Before everything went downhill.
"But what if she's here to finish what she started? To cause chaos again?"
Kadence laughs, and it comes out cold and frosty. Almost like ice. "What? To steal my throne? Frankly, I don't give a damn if she steals my fucking throne. She can have the popularity and the limelight and all of it. High School will be over soon, and then we'll all go our separate ways and no one will care which table you sat at in High School. They won't care if you were popular or a loser or an invisible because we were 16 and we thought the world couldn't stop us and we thought that everything revolved around us - but it doesn't. Because it was just High School."
Her words silence Braxton completely. He thought that she would appreciate the head's up, but she clearly can't care less. It seems like all she wants to do is leave Avensgrove and pursue whatever Scientific career she ended up choosing. And Braxton can't blame her.
"Sorry," she says in a smaller voice. "You didn't deserve that. I just needed to get it off my chest."
Braxton shrug-nods and doesn't push the subject. Clearly, everyone has plans to go to Greyson's gathering, and so he would go, too. Even if every fibre of his being told him not to.
They continue the drive in complete silence, neither of them daring to say a word.
"We're here," Braxton finally says, and Kadence looks up. "Where're you heading now?"
She presses her lips together. He knows for a fact that Kadence isn't going anywhere and he looks at her earnestly, eyes bearing into hers. He can't read her, not like how he used to. He hopes that she's going to invite him in, that she'll flash him the playful smile she used to or she'll reach out and ruffle his hair.
He wants her to do that - any of that. But he knows that that girl died a long time ago.
Died. Nice choice of words, Brax.
"Yeah. Um, thanks for the ride," she says, not answering the question, opening the door and sliding out. She gives him a half-hearted, meaningless smile before rushing towards the door of her house.
Unable to stop himself, he presses the car horn and she turns back.
"See you," he calls out to her.
He feels a sharp pain in his chest, thinking about how it used to be with her, thinking about how she used to be. He remembers the way she would nibble on her lips as she tore through her Science magazines, sprouting facts about animals and electrons and the nervous system and electricity. He would tease her, and she would shove him a little, but laughing nonetheless.
And now?
Now it's like they're strangers.
"Just give up," Orianna likes to tell him.
And when Kadence ignores his words, for the first time, he actually considers his sister's advice.
- - -
Kadence sits in her room, eyes staring down at her hands, her shoulders shaking. She doesn't know why the tears aren't flowing, or why she can't stop shaking. It took everything in her not to grab Braxton's face and kiss him in the car. It took every ounce of self control not to bawl like a crazy girl and tell him that she loves him.
So now, she sits alone in her room, surrounded by nothingness. Her mother used to tell her that she had some sort of depression, but her mother loved to glamorize diseases and was obsessed with the idea that she could cure Kadence - so the percentage of her being depressed is about as high as Blaire rising from the dead.
She puts her head in her hands and screams. No one is in the house. Her step-sister is still in school and her step-brother is with his boyfriend. Her mother is off spending her step-father's cash while he makes businessmen cry in China, or South Korea or even Thailand.
Thailand.
She hasn't thought about Thailand in years. In a drastic attempt to be happy, she runs to her dresser - a white, expensive thing her stepdad bought when she moved in, in a valiant attempt to buy her love. She grabs this old box of hers and pulls it out.
Kadence plops down onto her bed and opens the box. Years worth of mementos and photographs spill onto her lap and the crisp white of her bed. Some of the photos are new - taken last year - while others are old and faded, memoirs from a life in Thailand.
Kadence smiles as she looks at them, and she feels herself relaxing a bit. She picks up one of the faded photographs and smiles. She hardly remembers anything from her life in Thailand, considering she moved when she was in Kindergarten. But she does like to imagine her old life, even if she knows for a fact that it wasn't so great.
The picture is of her in the beach, and she's barely a year old. Her smile is large and practically toothless, but she knows that despite the situation of her upbringing, there were really great moments.
She puts down the picture and picks up another, smiling all the same. It's a new picture, one taken a year or two ago at a party - before Blaire died.
It's of her and Braxton. She's sitting beside him comfortably, and his arm is draped casually around her. Her tongue is stuck out and he's caught in the middle of laughing. She knows for sure that she didn't like him back then. She wouldn't have let him put his arm around her if she did.
She looks so happy, and so does he. Back then, everything was so simple. They were just best friends, and she didn't need to protect him from herself.
She feels her throat begin to constrict, and she can't take it anymore. A scream ripples from her throat, and the tears stream down her cheeks. She can't control her arms - they're pushing the photos and the mementos away, and her legs are kicking and thrashing. She can't stop screaming and she can't stop crying. Her throat feels raw, almost on the verge of splitting into two.
She can feel it. She can hear it, not all of it, but enough for her to remember. There are words bubbling from her tongue and lashing out violently.
"Whore," she hisses, in a voice that doesn't belong to her. "Slut! You fucking filthy skank," she whispers maliciously. Her hands are in her hair and she wants to stop she needs to stop stop stop stop stop.
But the words are pouring out, and the screams won't stop. She can see it - blows and punches and bodily functions and belts and bruises and her mother telling her to leave and the beer bottles on the floor.
The words are tumbling from her mouth, and she whispers to herself, "Stop. Stop."
But she can't.
For a minute, she's three years old again. The reality of her childhood - and not the one she built for herself - is crashing down onto her. It claws at her neck and the hands tighten around them and she can't breathe.
Her heart feels as if it's going to burst out of her chest any moment now, and erupt into fireworks of veins and arteries and ventricles.
"Calm down," she tells herself and begins to murmur incoherently. "Superior vena cava...arteriole...renin...erepsin," the words spill out of her lips in soft whispers, and her heart slows down.
The vision of her childhood fades and the screams simmer into whispers. She feels her legs stop thrashing and her arms stop pushing.
And then it returns to normal.
She blinks five times, and she's not in Thailand. She's in Avesngrove. She's in her room. She's on her bed.
And she's alone.
The wooden floors are full of pictures of people, and she almost laughs at how ironic it is.
She hugs her knees against her chest and she rocks herself, lips quivering.
I'm alone. I'm alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone.
There's no one with her, to hug her as she cries and tell her that she's going to be okay, even if she knows that she's not. There's no one here to hold her and cradle her and let her forget. Instead, she relies on Science to keep her sane.
She pretends that the white walls of the room are people, that they're her friends. She pretends that she's nestled in their arms and that they whisper sweet nothings. She crafts worlds and worlds of fairytales, as she did when she was little, to make her think that she's not alone. That someone actually loves her.
Even if she knows that it's her fault, too, for pushing them all away.
She wants to close her eyes and dream of illusions and fairy tales of grandeur. But she can't.
Because the first thing she sees behind shut lids isn't a candy-coated daydream, but the face belonging only to a nightmare.