[ON HOLD UNTIL 11/23] Always Have, Always Will~Topper Thornton /OC/ Pope Heyward

four.

tw: violence

When Jorja Jennings was in middle school, she was the number one little league softball player in the entire state of North Carolina.

She was born with a talented arm, and even more talented aim. She was so good at the sport of softball that in middle school, she was handpicked by a private institute to attend their school tuition-free, just for her to agree to play on their high school team the next year. Jorja's father was convinced she'd be a professional player one day, and he told everyone. Not a single person disagreed with him. Jorja had the talent to be a famous one day.

Maybe she would have, had the boating accident never happened.

The Jennings family used to have a boat, until this specific incident. Only two months after being accepted to a private school her family would never be able to afford on their own, her father allowed her and her friends to take the boat out by themselves for the first time ever.

It wasn't fair what happened. Jorja had been careful.

All the pogues had been careful. They didn't have any alcohol, or weed, they just wanted to go swimming.

But a group of college aged kooks had been drinking. And when it hit dusk, Jorja's boat wasn't visible to the drunk sailors. The kooks clipped the side of their speed boat against the Jenning's small fishing boat while going more than fifty miles an hour.

Luckily, most people were unharmed. JJ sprained an ankle, and Kiara had to get stitches on her upper left arm, John B had to get seven stitches on his torso, and Pope had to wear a knee brace for a month. But besides that, they were tossed out of the water and into safety.

Except Jorja. She had been behind the wheel, on the side that got hit. Inside of flying into the water, she was launched over the wheel of the boat. Her arm was caught on the wheel, and it stayed where it was, the caught arm keeping her inside the boat.

The bone in her left arm shattered in four different areas. It took over a year for her to get out of a cast. Her softball playing days were over. Her left arm would be fragile the rest of her life, and no reputable sports team would ever sign on someone with such a high health risk, even if it was just a city team.

Just like that, her whole life changed. Being poor in the outerbanks didn't seem too bad when you had potential to get out of there one day. Now, there was nothing. She was going to be stuck where she was forever. At least she had friends to make the island seem less miserable.

And, on the bright side, her father often let her off from doing that much yard work. He'd rather die than be the cause of that arm breaking again.

But today, it seemed he didn't care about the dangers of manual in labor. He was too angry to.

She shoved the dead leaves into the trash can, pouting. "This isn't even fair," she complained. "Mr. Cameron's people are coming next week to clean everything up. Why do I have to do this now? It's not like I'm gonna get anything done."