captured pray

Prying Eyes/Raine

Raine took her time walking home on her final day of school, 1,460 days she had spent in the Dayton public school. 1,460 days surrounded by sad beige walls and cold tile floors. She did not really know how much she had truly grown as a person in that time. However, in the last few months she had felt those sad beige walls concaving in on her causing her to feel quite claustrophobic.
She had grown so used to the monotony of the day to the day this new found panic of hurling blindly into the unknown was quite suffocating. The feeling of being left out of the games her peers would play outside in elementary school slowly began to creep back in. Like some long forgotten piece of furniture shoved in the darkest corner of her mind's attic. If Raine could help, she would have left those cobwebs unbothered so that she did not have to be swarmed by the spiders that nested inside them.
She had come a long way from the sad pathetic little girl with the mousy brown hair and hideous glasses. Now she stood as the head of the student council leader of the pep squad. Yes, she may not have known rather or not she had grown as a person she did know she grew as someone.
     Raine was now not  entirely sure that selling her soul for the peak high school experience was worth it. Now she walked home, the breath escaping her lungs. None of it seemed worth it; she had lost herself in the maze of what was supposed to make her happy. She had been swept up and swept away by a tornado of cliches and societal roles.  No longer could she proclaim with unwavering confidence that she knew who she was and what she wanted.
     That was the only thing she missed about the mousy hair girl. She missed her strong willed  determination and unwavering self assurance. Raine now more than anything more than  popularity, more than her need for her parents' love and approval, all she wanted to do was to be able to tell somebody what she was going to do now that her 1,460 days of high school were over. Now that she could escape the deeply depressing monotony of her life, what she was going to do with her freedom. How she was going to take this new found freedom of hers and run with it like a dream powered steam engine.  She didn’t have that dream though, she had the will and motivation to leave. However, she couldn’t find her divine purpose that would provide her the confidence to do so. So she was stuck like she always had been since she was that little mousey haired girl. Stuck in the thick black all consuming tar that was her life, left with no escape or hope for her future. 
On days like this Raine felt the full crushing weight of her name in the way her mother had always described it to her. She was like a thunderstorm that tore into people's lives leaving them with nothing and no one. She was the dark cloud that had smothered out any ember of hope for the future her mother might have had and she made sure Raine knew it.  Raine was the reason that at sixteen her mother was forced to marry a twenty- eight year old abusive alcoholic. Raine was the reason that she was stuck in a dead end town in a two room trailer. Raine was the reason she never was and never was going to be happy. That's the way that her mother treated her most days.
Sometimes though a wave of pure bliss would sweep over her mother and she was no longer stuck in a life with no prospects. Her life was full of prospects, and Raine was the reason for all of them. Raine could get a college degree with all of her brains and wit, and use that college degree to get a well paying job. To whisk them both away from the drab miserable lives in the trailer park. It was on days like this that Raine almost remembered why she loved her mother.
Not to say that her father was any picnic either, Raine had scraped his sad almost lifeless body off the pavement more times then she could count. She had cleaned his bruised knuckles while simultaneously cleaning and bandaging her mothers black eye’s. Of all of the good qualities about herself that were always too far out of reach to bring to words. There was one that she was able to hold so closely in her fist it made her knuckles white, she was nothing like them and with any luck she never would be.
A cold chill washed over Raine’s body as she became suddenly aware that the sun was almost set and she was on a very dimly lit road. She wasn’t scared of walking home in the dark; she was scared of what now almost certainly awaited her at home. Shrill yelling voices of her parents striking in unison about how she was late for cooking dinner and would therefore be up the rest of the night doing her house chores. Sometimes Raine felt like a less blindly happy version of Cinderella because unlike her there was no chance of a magical fairy godmother coming to save Raine. 
In the midst of loathing her life, Raine had not noticed the  black van creeping behind her. She did not notice the cold prying eyes of the man driving or how dangerously close to her he was getting.  And she would not notice not until a large pale, clammy hand wrapped itself around her like a vicious serpent. Meanwhile, the other covered her mouth and noses with a damp cloth that smelled faintly of licorice. Then in what seemed like the fastest thirty seconds of her life her eyelids fell like boulders and her body cashed out from underneath of her will. Raine will probably never know how long she lay motionless in the back of that van, or how many times Bradley slowed down on a public road out of fear that she would slam her head into the medal doors.
She would only know the cold medal chain that was locked to her ankle when she woke up almost twenty-four hours later. All she would know is the sorrowful black brick walls and cold concrete floor.