LETTERS SHE WROTE.
❝I hope that someday when I am gone,
someone, somewhere, picks my soul up
off of these pages and thinks:
I would have loved her. ❞
OUTER BANKS.
BOOK ONE of the LETTERS TRILOGY.
[ SEASONS 1 - 2 ]
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I do not own any rights to Ou...
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[ xxxi. the twilight zone ]
➸➸➸
IT WAS ANOTHER FULL day before John B. was released from St. Olives Hospital, but in those pivotal twenty-four hours, much had changed within the dynamic of the pogues' overall group. The first change, understandably, was that the group of four had grown to a group of five. Willa was, more or less, a friend for life now.
She was, however, also grounded, which meant that if Willa snuck out of the Deveraux mansion again to join her new friends in their treasure hunt schemes, she would, as her mother had said it, "be a dead woman".
And yet, even with the very real threat against her life, she still snuck out again that very next morning after coming home from the hospital herself, which led to the next drastic change over the course of one day: Willa was now currently taking shelter at the Chateau. She was free to treat the Routledge household as her own, which she mostly did as she was now the only one living in it. Because, yes, John B. no longer lived at the Chateau which led to the biggest and final change of all: John B. was currently being fostered by the Cameron family.
Willa still did not know what Sarah Cameron had said to her father that night at the hospital, but clearly, it had been enough to win Ward over. Before the sun had even fully risen that next day Ward was inducting a fourth child into his household, and he did it all with the brightest smile.
Anything for his little princess.
Bullshit.
There had to be more to Ward Cameron's motives. Willa just had not figured it out yet. The gears in her head were still turning around that puzzle.
And so, as a result of all the ensuing mayhem, in the course of only twenty-four hours, Willa and John B. had essentially switched lives. Now she really was a pogue, slumming it down on the far end of the Cut, and he was really a kook, living the high life on the vast, luscious hills of the Figure Eight.
This realization—and acceptance—of their new reality had nearly made JJ vomit. Nearly. Because though it had hurt him to see his brother pulled so far away, he was now having more than enough fun teasing a newly lower-class Willa with every chance that he got; a feat that was proven rather easy considering Willa spent most of the day cleaning up all of JJ's messes within the Chateau—all the while still fighting for a single piece of normalcy to bring to the home that every teenager seemed to find themselves living in at one point or another.
Yet even as Willa tried her darndest to keep the Chateau in order, it was already beginning to suffocate her. It was supposed to be a safe space, yet she could not look around the open living room without seeing those two gunmen nearly tear the house apart in search of a compass. Every time she lingered on a creaking floorboard, a faraway part of her suddenly held her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
