Road to Someplace

Chapter Sixteen

 Without Raveena, the house was rather quiet. I started spending quiet mornings walking with Sophia and sitting in the living room, sinking into one of the chairs as Sophia sat across from me. We would talk, or just sit in silence, sometimes the only noise being the clinking of her knitting needles as she kept her hands busy with something. Ace would come down for breakfast very early in the morning, but sometimes he would linger long enough for me to see him. Stewart would come down as well, usually when it hit nine. Hailey usually slept in till ten, sometimes later if she had spent the previous night staying up to work on The Songbirds. I could usually tell when she did, because I was always awaken by her complaints as either Stewart or Sophia urged her up the stairs, telling her she needed to go to bed. It was always a bit amusing to listen to her whine and complain, sounding like a sleepy child trying to stay up late. Her protests were always laced with a tired tone, her words sometimes slurred, her words jumbled up from how fatigued she was.

It was the end of the week when Raveena returned. She was grinning for most of the day when she came back, refreshed from her visit to her family, I suppose. She excitedly showed Hailey and Sophia a pair of earrings her parents gifted to her. She bothered me as well, shoving them in my face just to see me glare at her, unamused, and smack them away.

That night, however, her demeanor shifted to serious for a moment.

I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. Raveena rushed in, opening and slamming the door in a flash. "The hell?" I said, my speech muffled by the toothbrush and abundance of blue foam in my mouth. I tried to say, 'What are you doing?', but it came out as an even more incoherent jumble of muffled mumbles.

"Shut up," She commanded. I obeyed, raising an eyebrow. It wasn't like I could protest too much with a toothbrush in my mouth. "Okay, so my moms didn't bring up you being missing and all that jazz, probably because they didn't want me upset or whatever. Anyway, your ugly face is plastered on every lamppost in existence at this point, although I basically had to pretend like I was blind when I went outside so it didn't look like I noticed that you were gone. Anyway, I saw a police car outside your house, so the investigation seems pretty active still. I think they were around town too, so I guess they still think you might be in the town, or at least in the area," She said.

By that time, I had already washed my mouth out, and was dabbing at the remaining foam lingering at the sides of my lips. I turned to her, towel in hand. "So?" I asked.

Raveena rolled her eyes, like I was an idiot missing out on the fact that the ocean was blue or something. She let out an exasperated sigh as well, clearly dramatizing her reaction to make an ass out of me. "So, they haven't traced you out here, and that's, get this, good. And listen, I was thinking of this. Now, the ideal situation would be that you go back at the end of the summer with some BS story about how you ran away because your parents suck, blah blah blah, you hid out in some motel or around a city area, whatever, case closed, your parents lock you up forever and I don't get arrested for some crime with more than four syllables. But, if somehow, the police get a clue or a lead, and track you here, then that's just handcuffs for me and possibly everyone else here. So, I was thinking: We need to get our story straight," She declared.

I groaned. "Oh god," I muttered. She rolled her eyes, a grin back on her face.

"Oh, shut up. This is important, so listen up. Luckily for you, I already planned it out, so you don't have to try to use that tiny little brain of yours and do this thing called thinking," She said. I scoffed, narrowing my eyes into slits and furrowing my eyebrows in a tight knit.

"You say that, but I'm not the one who thought that pushing a kid off the swing-set and tackling him to the ground was a good means of introduction," I retorted.