Through Her Eyes (Camren)

Chapter 19: In The Quiet

Lauren never planned on living in the house she lived in. She never planned on working the job she worked. She never planned on befriending a strange girl named Camila, either.

Lauren never planned a lot of things.

"You have so many shiny things. Don’t you want them anymore?"

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Chapter 19: In The Quiet

A/N: Oh my god, guys!! All of your comments are amazing!! Here’s Chapter 19!! I hope you like it :)

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When Lauren was six years old, she thought she’d spend her life making music.

She still thought that. The music just had to wait for her to make someone’s cup of coffee.

When Lauren was nine she thought she’d spend her life with her neighbor Keaton, because he was obsessed with her and told her they were getting married and threatened to tell her mom she had beat him up if she didn’t agree. Lauren didn’t want to be grounded the rest of her life for beating her neighbor up. She agreed.

When Lauren hit puberty she decided to spend her life playing softball, since she was good at it.

When she was sixteen, her grandmother helped her buy a guitar, and Lauren decided that she’d spend the rest of her life holding the sleek guitar.

Then, her grandmother died and Lauren put the guitar away and decided she’d do nothing, be nothing, have no one. It wasn’t worth it.

So Lauren was nothing for a year.

Then Camila found her, changed everything, radiant and sparkling and Lauren’s heart beating, blood pumping like it never had before. And Lauren allowed herself to think secretly, quietly, that she might spend her life with Camila.

Now she thought she might spend her life with a shadow of Camila.

Camila was quiet after Lauren pushed her away, and somehow Lauren thought it might be good. Camila might have accepted it, Camila might be thinking it over, and Camila might move on.

Move on, Lauren thought, but she’d keep being Camila, they’d keep being Camila and Lauren. Lauren didn’t want to lose Camila. Lauren couldn’t lose Camila, she thought with a shiver.

It didn’t quite go that way. She should have known; nothing with Camila ever went how Lauren thought it would.

It started with something shiny in Lauren’s trashcan and it ended that way too. When Lauren looked into the trash in her kitchen the day after pushing Camila away, staring down into its undisturbed contents, it caught her eye.

It glittered, something that should not have been there with Camila in the house, flickered at Lauren from beneath garbage. She reached a hand in for it like Camila would have but was not, and pulled the cold metal out.

It was her spatula. Twisted, wrong, discarded.

Lauren’s hand shook and she clenched it harder around the bent handle.

“I’m sorry,” she told the twisted metal – Ariana, Lauren remembered – her voice wavering in an empty space of a cold room.

The spatula did not respond.

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Lauren should have never told Camila it was the way she talked, the way she danced, the way she was. Lauren should have said she just wasn’t interested in Camila; she should have lied.