When he asked her out she said yes and the quiet boy and Ashley started a sweet, fun courtship. She felt really comfortable with her new beau, Buck, and started to relax and feel like herself again.
However, what Ashley did not realize is that she had built her future on the idea of things always working out in her favor. She had no contingency plan for things going wrong. She did not realize she was building her life on such an unstable base, she just knew that she finally felt happy and free after so long. Her mother had wooed and married the human man, Wayne, and the children had moved in with him. Wayne was okay at first, but quickly became very impatient and frustrated with Ashley and her mother's lack of perfection. Ashley was happy to spend most of her time outside of the home with either Buck or at school. But when she was home, her mother acted irrationally angry and stressed out by Wayne's impatience and intolerance with them. She seemed to always take it out on Ashley, even telling her outright that she was destroying her marriage because she wasn't good enough in so many ways. Ashley and her mother would fight loudly and bitterly and constantly when she was home, until the conflict finally ended and she was allowed to retreat to her own space to desperately wish the future would come and she could move away from these horrible people.
And then, imperceptibly at first, the solace that Ashley had found with Buck started slowly eroding. Without realizing she had started doing it, her mother and Wayne's constant judgment had started coming out of her own mouth. She was finding fault with Buck often, and as a result he was distancing himself from her. This made her panic inside and her previous loneliness started to peek out and terrify her. She desperately wanted to avoid going back to that terrible black hole where she was so alone and unwanted and unworthy. But as she became desperate to keep Buck from pulling away, things simply got worse and worse until he finally broke things off with her. The pain of this breakup, merging with all of the trauma of her childhood, life without a father, the hopelessness of a productive future she felt, the continued conflict and isolation at home, and the huge, unhealed loss and heartbreak that losing Bernard had caused, all compounded into a churning vortex of despair. Also, when she had begun dating Buck, her friendships had all fallen away, as she began centering her whole life around the good feelings her romantic union brought her. And now she found herself unbearably alone, her only company a head and heart full of bad thoughts and sadness. Her teachers still gave her a lot of praise and had a lot of belief in her abilities, but her extreme sadness and disillusionment with her life and the people close to her made their compliments very muted. These tiny voices of acceptance were completely drowned out by the crushing despair of everything else.
Ashley began to dread and avoid sleep, since when the sun went down and everything else stopped, that's when all of the bad thoughts and feelings were at their climax. She tried everything she could to stay up as late as possible, distracting herself by any means necessary. More and more often this became food, and obsessively collecting and organizing random items, such as seashells and rocks, into her own form of art. Ashley had almost finished human school at this point, and was supposed to choose a trade and become an apprentice. At this point she felt so worthless and disconnected and anxious about people, she postponed this choice longer than she should have. Her mother ended up choosing for her so that she did not miss this opportunity entirely, bitterly chastising Ashley for her procrastination. Not knowing her daughter very well, and wanting to choose something that had a good potential future in her own mind, Scarlett chose for Ashley to apprentice under a master of etiquette and manners. Ashley actually abhorred the idea of making everyone act the same and pretend all the time. Subconsciously, this was because it was how she existed, and she knew that it was miserable. Long ago she had banished any sense of authenticity and self-confidence in favor of a hope for outside validation and praise. To have to now study this as a trade made Ashley even more miserable.
