This is Me Trying ⭑ Rafe Cameron

sixty seven

SIXTY SEVEN
[67]
song: the payoff by father john misty

Cassie Maybank had already experience more grief in her life than any nineteen year old ever should. Than anyone ever should.

A traumatic car crash that resulted in the loss of her mom and put herself on painkillers as a pre-teen, should have been enough to push the girl over the edge. The loss of a mother at eleven years old should have been impossible to come back from.

Moving from the life she knew in Texas to a new life with new caretakers was hard enough, losing both of them, her Grandma and Grandpa— within the span of three years— made it harder.

Maybe it was the drugs that held Cassie for that long, kept her going until it got so bad she lost a year of her life to rehab.

She'd worked through it all then, hundreds upon hundreds of therapy sessions to understand that drugs did absolutely nothing to aid her in grief. The drugs she'd gotten herself addicted to were putting a bandaid on a bullet-wound.

Now, Kitty Hawk had its flaws, but Kitty Hawk taught her this: you couldn't numb grief without numbing everything else, too.

Cassie had cried more tears than she thought the human body was capable of. Not just in the past seventy-two hours, but ever. Her whole life was just a big mess of grief, and loss, and disaster. Nothing had ever seemed to go right, and it didn't look like things were about to start now.

Things, actually, were worse than ever.

The loss of her brother was a pain different from all the others. Losing her mom was like losing her innocence, her childhood. And losing her grandparents had left her feeling abandoned all over again. But losing her brother felt like having a piece of her soul ripped clean from her chest, and she was just left bleeding.

There were pieces of her life that only existed because JJ had been there to live them with her.

And now there would be no more memories made with him. No future versions of him she would get to know.

No growing old, no watching their lives slowly get better, no swell days, no smoking by the bonfire, no sarcastic remarks that were so tonally out of place.

Cassie would keep getting older, and JJ wouldn't.

And she just kept thinking about how she'd always pictured something better for him. For the both of them. They were going to leave their shitty childhoods behind, and both be free from this fear that Luke had so instilled in them. Fear of not being strong enough, fear of abandonment, fear of retaliation if they did something wrong. They were going to fix the generational Maybank trauma— even if one of them weren't really a Maybank.

She'd pictured a life where they got scholarships and went to college, made friends that knew nothing about Pogues or Kooks, worked shitty part-time jobs and then eventually hit it big once they got degrees. They'd buy houses, nice ones. On Figure Eight, or nowhere near the Outerbanks.

They wanted to prove Luke wrong so bad.

And now JJ would never get the chance.

Instead, his body lay lifeless, buried underneath a pile of sand in a country he'd likely never heard of before, and she'd likely never return to.