IN WHICH after a friendship blow up, Talia Anderson chooses one friend over the other and realizes she either has to stay an ousted kook or learn to live life like a pogue. Problem one, she's a kook through and through. Problem two, pogue king John...
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❝and now a piece of me is a piece of the beach and it falls just where it needs to be and rests peacefully so you just need to breathe to feel my heart against yours now against yours now❞
-wake me up, ed sheeran
𓇼
chapter eighteen, A PAIR OF GRIEVING TEENAGERS
Talia Anderson was fine.
Despite the fact that the girl was clearly not fine, anytime she was asked how she was doing, it was exactly how she'd respond. Fine. The word became the most annoying thing Kiara Carrera had ever heard, so she stopped asking. And suddenly, it was the end of summer, and the girls had gone without so much as locking eyes with each other.
Kiara Carrera and JJ Maybank seemed to slip away and find solitude with each other until a fight would break out, and they'd flee. The cycle repeating too many times. JJ would get high and down a couple of beers, and Kiara would pretend to be okay, taking day trips to the mainland to participate in some charity event that involved cleaning up something or another.
Pope Heyward found himself trying to make up for the loss of his scholarship interview. The interview he utterly bombed when he ran out of it, not even halfway through. The library had a permanent spot for him, the table always waiting for him day in and day out. Between helping his dad during his free time and burying himself in school work and essay prep, he didn't have much time to think about anything and that included the death of his best friend.
That left Talia, high in her palace. Reclaiming her 'rightful' place as a kook princess, pulled around like a trophy for her mother to show off and a way to somehow distract the patrons of the country club and residents of Figure Eight of the fact that not only had there been the murder of the sheriff that summer but that the SBI and Kildare County police department chased a seventeen-year-old pogue out into raging waters and got him killed.
It was as if the island had forgotten about what transpired that fateful summer. It was as if it was better to just pretend it never happened and to move on like the two deaths didn't rock four teenagers' entire lives.
"Talia, Matteo is here for you." It was officially the longest stretch of time that the other mother had appeared for. At first, Talia fell right into the trap and then, after a week, breathed some fresh air and cleared her lungs. She raised her walls and kept her barriers fully guarded. But when that week turned into a few, she started to wonder if maybe Laurel Anderson was just content to pretend she was always a good mother.
"okay!" Talia called down, fixing her makeup in the mirror before stepping out into the hallway to find her mother sitting at the kitchen counter on her laptop, her fingers rapidly tapping away at the keys. "I'll be back after class." Laurel waved her off absentmindedly, yet not in the way Talia would have expected.
