Oblivion

Chapter One

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Nova: one month later

I had never moved outside of North Carolina before in my life until that summer when the weather seemed to only have one setting: scorching hot with sun rays penetrating through every crevice. Denver was different than Southport by a long shot. They were indubitably polar opposites, completely different sides of a coin, which was probably the reason why I found it so difficult to adjust during the first few weeks of my time there.

It was somewhere between the end of June and the beginning of July when I boarded a plane and flew out halfway across the country to Denver with my best friend Xavier. Our friendship was much similar to Peter Pan and Tinker Bell. Except instead of Neverland and fairy dust, our story was cultivated in a town right off the coast of the Atlantic ocean and was no more extraordinary than the next. That was, of course, unless the span of our friendship was taken into consideration.

Xavier and I had been pulling at each other's hair and taking spontaneous trips to the local convenience store in the middle of the night for almost eleven years. For the longest time, we thought we would never travel beyond a radius of 100 miles. Always, it appeared like there was an invisible magnetic force pulling us back to the interior away from the allure of the rest of the world.

But things changed.

Everything happened so rapidly. One second, Xavier was about to head off to art school in Brunswick. We were expecting to part ways the moment I got my acceptance letter to a university in Wilmington. Then the next thing we knew, our clothes and things were being shipped on a plane off to Brixton University. It was suddenly like the figurative gates of our lives magically opened. We were finally given the key to escape this trap of a town.

The move surely was transformative.

Before we relocated into the dorms, Xavier and I resided at his aunt's homely cottage in the countryside. There, we applied for a job at a well known catering service under the name of Wells Delicacies, and that was where Xavier would work for the remainder of the summer until school started. As for myself, I couldn't exactly say the same.

The memory burned fresh in the back of my mind, every action and word still vivid like it just happened yesterday. I could still hear the manager's voice ringing in my ears after the night of the incident. Natalie was livid, I could practically see steam spewing out of her ears. Her hands were clenched into tight fists. Her voice boomed and bounced off of the walls. It was so ear-splitting that she could have been heard from the next building over.

I still remembered what she had said.

"Do you know what you have just done, Nova? You've jeopardized our whole business. Do you know who you were dealing with out there? That was Anne Styles. Styles!" She repeated the last name to instill reverence for the affluent family, but I saw nothing valuable in throwing a pretentious party to manifest the amount of money you stowed away in your bank account. "You will never get a job again in this state, yet alone this town. Who even knows if you will ever be hired in this country!" At that point, her vocabulary had narrowed down to profanity.

When I was finally relinquished from Natalie's presence, I remembered running right through the back door in the kitchen where the produce truck usually pulled through with my face buried in the material of my white blouse to mask the stream of tears rushing from the corner of my eyes. I made it all the way to the edge of the parking lot before I was startled by the chatter of hushed voices. My eyes darted to my surroundings and I distinguished a group of wasted boys with teenage girls hooked around their arms. The one with curly hair and piercing eyes stared right at me but I quickly turned my head to shield my swollen eyes. All I could do in that moment was hope that Denver wouldn't be as vulgar, and I wasn't let down.