All Over Again

| Chapter Sixteen |

"Hey Ruthie! You're home late—"

Ruth sped past a blabbering Jana to head straight to her room, determination in her eyes and cotton in her ears. Her backpack clenched to the front of her body was a barrier between herself and the girls until she could get a single thought out onto a piece of paper. There wasn't much time left and she needed to finish brainstorming ideas so she can get the words typed up. And she needed to get her mind off of Raffo, whose strange reaction earlier was tugging at her mind.

Jana cut herself off mid-sentence, the silence following Ruth into the room where she closed her bedroom door and ran to her cluttered desk of paper assignments and syllabi. Her fingers grabbed for an old assignment and flipped it over to the blank side, flicked the ink in her pen, and began to scribble down ideas. Eyebrows furrowed, and lips turned to the side, she was a force to be reckoned with for the next few hours.

She didn't mean to be rude to Jana. To be fair, she didn't even hear Jana. So when Jana came in to bring her dinner, Ruth was quick to apologize after Jana commented on it. But Jana only waved her off and gave a generous grin, gesturing to the plate of goodies in her palm.

A plate full of Taco Bell tacos; the simple way to Ruth's heart.

While Ruth munched away on her soft taco and Jana went to give her company away to Terry, she skimmed over what she had written down so far. Scribbled over a few pages of notes was hints of a story Ruth had heard her father tell her before. A true story about a man named William Roebuck who had fallen in love with a childhood friend, but due to the Indian Removal Act, they were separated as children until they both ran into each other again by colossal accident. The story ends with the two marrying one another and poof; the end.

So, this gave Ruth the idea to write a story similar to this one. She always loved classic "separated by years of time but eventually find one another" love stories, so she used that story as the basis of what she was going to write about. So, before she wasted anymore time, she began typing away on her laptop. She typed until her eyes grew heavy and her fingers cramped from curving over a keyboard all night. She typed until all she could see was the couple she wrote about instead of William Roebuck and his love Palayra Homa.

Ruth only got a few chapters in before she closed up her laptop and called it a night, but a few chapters were better than no chapters at all.

And this way, she dreamed up more and more wonderful ideas that sprouted behind her eyelids like Spring buds. She danced in flower fields, watched love bloom, envisioned the lake where William saw Palayra again. The dreams were colorful and beautiful, and when Ruth awake the next morning, she was very happy she made the deal with Raffo.

*****

The next few days passed by in a breeze. Ruth turned in her first chemistry exam of the semester with extreme confidence as well as her lab report for Anatomy and Physiology. She even had time to work on her story in between classes and at home after eating an early dinner with the girls. It wasn't easy, and Ruth knew it would soon get harder to find time to work on the story once she was deeper into the first portion of the semester, but with how the story is already developing, she knew she could have it done within the next few weeks.

In her spare period, after stepping out of the coffee shop with her usual in her hand, Ruth was about to find her picnic table to crack open her notebook, when a familiar pair captured her attention. She was used to them being together, always walking around or drinking coffee with one another, sometimes hanging out outside of school.

But what Ruth wasn't used to, however, was seeing them angry with each other.

Mirana's manicured fingers were wrapped around the edges of her slender waist as she leaned towards Raffo. Her lips were rapidly moving, saying something that obviously had him fuming, as her eyebrows furrowed together, eyes narrowed on some part of Raffo's face that Ruth couldn't see almost spitefully. She jabbed at his chest with her forefinger, using it to enunciate each angry syllable she spewed from her tongue.