ILLUSION, ELI HALE

nine | jailbreak

Nadia was in jail.

Her mother had confiscated her phone and she'd chosen to lock herself away from those demons downstairs who knew nothing other than that they wanted to ruin her life.

No Eli? They just had to be joking. Everyone who knew Nadia—who truly knew that girl, knew that she and Eli were a package deal. Wherever Nadia was, Eli was there too. And vice-versa. You couldn't just say that the friendship was over. It didn't work that way.

Nadia couldn't let that happen. He was her rock. He was her humanity. Without Eli, she was a grumpy teenager with an attitude problem who hated popular girls. He was the positive light that she needed. Without him, she would revert back to the person she hated.

She had been sitting against the door of her bedroom, staring at the wall for who knows how long. Her phone was probably being ravaged through by Nathan and Margie who had no regard for privacy as they read through her and Eli's messages.

She deserved this. Nadia thought to herself. Honestly, how long did she think this gimmick would last? One day they were going to realize that Stacy Freeman was not a real person. Margie and Nathan's reactions would have gone this way, that was obvious. Eli would have been collateral damage. But she didn't want it to be now. Because now everything was different. That bubble she had, that second happy life she lived with her best friend had been inside of it, but it popped. It deflated. She was back to the cold, sad reality.

Her family hated her, that was the only possible explanation. They wanted to see her suffer. It was payback for getting too close to the enemy. But wasn't that the plan in the first place? Get information from the boy so that they could take down Hale Auto? God, that sounded like bullshit even more now that Nadia was fifteen and smarter. How was it that she was the one who turned her back on the family?

Nadia couldn't help but think about what her other half was doing right now. He'd been in trouble with this jeep many more times than she had. Hopefully, Eli had spoken to his dad about his concerns. Hopefully, they'd managed to talk it out and makeup. That was the difference between her family and theirs. Communication was actually a thing in the Hale household.

Technically, this was Eli's fault, but Nadia couldn't care much about that. She'd decided to go along with him. She knew the consequences if they got caught. She knew that she would be sitting in the back of Parrish's truck, thinking of ways that she could change the story into something that went in her favor. Evidently, that didn't happen.

Nadia wanted to be anywhere other than her tiny ass bedroom. She felt like this place was a real jail cell, suffocating her with the stale feeling of depression. After a while, after Nadia had cried all her angry tears out, her mother had come in and confiscated both her laptop and camera. Despite the teenagers protests that she needed those for school (It was Friday and she had no homework), her mother had lugged the items downstairs and out of reach.

The teenager didn't even know what time it was. It had to be nearing the evening, she estimated. She and Eli had left school just before three pm, they got caught not even a half hour later. She'd already begun to lose count of the hours of her imprisonment.

Without technology or Eli, Nadia was losing it.

The last time she'd been separated from the boy this long was a family trip to Disney World. Halfway through, Nadia was just thinking about how much Eli would have loved it there.

Feeling quite melodramatic, she found a piece of paper in her Spanish 2 binder, taped it to her door, and started a line at the top. It was the beginning of her prison sentence and she was going to count her days down by tallying up the marks as she'd seen in the movies.