oblivion

i.

A bump in the road woke Willa with a start. With the bus seemingly hitting every pothole from Colorado to California, it was impossible for her to get much sleep with the exception of an hour here or there. Three different buses in 24 hours was beginning to take its toll on her and she was in dire need of a heaping cup of coffee. Or a thirty-six hour nap. Either would be nice. 

She thumbed around for her phone and switched the song a few times - her playlists started getting repetitive a few hours ago, but now she was downright bored by each song. Conceding to the fact that she wouldn't be getting any more sleep on this journey, she turned her eyes to the world outside. The waning moon shone down on the road and forest beyond, lighting everything in an ethereal glow. In the shadows, a sign was very clear in the pale moonlight: 

Welcome to Beacon Hills.

She took a deep breath, thinking about the prospect of having to start a whole new life in this town. It excited her. She could make herself a different person and be who she wanted to be. And, most importantly, she could finally move on from the drama that always seemed to surround her.

Ever since her father was arrested two months ago, her life had been a living hell. Not that it wasn't tough before then, but this made it particularly worse.

No one, except maybe her dog, wanted to be her friend. Some days it seemed like even he didn't want to be anywhere near the dark cloud that followed her.

Her friends avoided her. Her teachers looked at her with a mixture of pity and disgust. People started whispering whenever she entered a room. And everyone seemed to think she was a junkie - just like him. To be clear, she couldn't think of anyone she wanted to be less like. Just the thought of that stubborn man with his perpetually tired blue eyes, the same as her own, annoyed her.

So, given how isolated she had become, Willa jumped at the first chance to leave Denver and live with her Aunt Carol and step-Uncle James. Not that she had much choice, anyways, considering she was a minor for a few more months and her only guardian was about to spend some serious time behind bars. They were the only family she had left as far as she knew, but she always liked spending time with them. When she was younger and her father was a little more put together, they'd spend a week over the summer in Beacon Hills. Some of her favorite memories were from these weeks when she'd just run around with Liam through his town pretending to be astronauts or wizards. And when it got dark out, they'd spend hours on end trying to catch every last firefly in mason jars.

The bus rolled to a stop at the side of the road near the hospital at about 10pm. The plan was for her to go and hang out in the waiting room until James got off work around 11. That was assuming that he wasn't going to be busy or in the middle of surgery. She slung her backpack and suitcase over her shoulders and trudged towards the entrance.

A warm breeze swept across the parking lot as she neared the building. With it, an ambulance came ripping past her, close enough that her hair was ripped in the direction of the vehicle. She glared in the driver's direction with intentions of yelling at him for being so careless. When he swung open the back doors and unloaded the patient, she understood the rush. A boy, about her age, was being wheeled in to the hospital with an officer following closely behind them. His white t-shirt was covered in blood.

Willa's nosiness got the best of her, and she tailed them inside.

She made it one step in the hallway before being shoved to the side by a doctor. The chaos seemed a bit uncharacteristic for a town that was always quiet when she visited. She looked on as medical personal ran around barking orders at one another. And the boy on the stretcher was barely conscious.