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The house was dark when Cherry slipped in through the side door, her Mary Janes clicking softly on the kitchen floor and blending with the quiet hum of the refrigerator. She paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the dim light and looked around the room - in the sink, plates and cups were piled high, and there was a pan encrusted with the remnants of scrambled eggs left abandoned on the stove. It looked like her parents hadn't bothered to clean up after dinner, but something instinctual told Cherry that it was just a matter of basic neglect rather than panic over her whereabouts.
Slowly, Cherry began to climb the stairs - despite how many years she'd lived in this house and how many times she'd made this same trek to her room, she still found herself unsure of exactly how many steps there were. A bitter taste of disappointment rose in her throat. A part of her had hoped, silly as it was, that she would come home to find her parents in shambles over the fact that she was gone. That maybe the sight of her empty bed would spark some concern, even though neither her mother nor her father ever came to say goodnight. That she might have come home to hastily made flyers strewn across the table, her school photo staring back at her under the word MISSING in bold, frantic letters.
Was it too much to ask for someone to care about her?
The house remained stubbornly silent. No lights flickered on at the barely perceptible creak of the staircase; no panicked whispers came from behind her parent's door, and no hurried footsteps came down the hall. It stung more than Cherry would've liked to admit, especially after the events of that night. In a perfect world, she would've stumbled into her mother's arms and cried about how a boy had broken her heart and pretended, just for a moment, that she was still a normal girl.
But normal girls did not appear in footage taken a week from now and they did not associate with boys who cried wolf about the apocalypse.
Was it fair to say that Five had broken her heart? It had only been two days, after all. Two days. Cherry had only known him for two days. Was it possible to break a heart in such a short, trivial amount of time? Was her heart even important enough to break or just so bloated with contusions that it felt like it?
Cherry thought it would've hurt less - the rejection, the abandonment - if someone reached into her chest and ripped out her poor, rabbit heart and crushed it between their fingers.
Cherry pushed the door to her bedroom open, her shoulders slumping as she saw the sight that beheld her. There were clothes strewn across the floor, a broken vase, and a picture frame with shattered glass that distorted the image within. Cherry's eyes landed on that - the picture frame - and bent down to pick it up, her fingers tracing the fault line of the glass. It was a photo of her and Iona on their last day of senior year - it had only been taken last September, but it felt like it had been a lifetime since then.
They stood proudly in front of their high school, Cherry wore a light pink, button-up blouse with short sleeves that flared slightly at the edge. It was tucked into a high-waisted, A-line denim skirt, the deep blue fabric slightly worn. Her shoes were white Keds, simple and comfortable, and her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail with a colorful bandana tied around it - bright red with small white polka dots. Her nails were painted in a soft peach color, and she wore a thin gold chain around her neck. Iona, on the other hand, looked like she'd walked out of a bohemian dream. She wore a loose, slightly oversized floral-print dress that skimmed just below her knees, the muted colors of deep purples, greens, and blues swirling across the fabric like an impressionist painting. The dress had a high neck, cinched with a thin belt around her waist. Her legs were clad in opaque, navy tights, and her shoes were low-heeled brown ankle boots. Iona's long hair, a cascade of auburn waves, was braided loosely at the crown of her head, with stray wisps falling carelessly around her face. She wore minimal makeup - just a hint of eyeliner and a touch of blush - and around her neck hung a silver pendant on a simple chain, a memento from her grandmother.
