Liam

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

 

Savannah Collins

I should’ve waited to get the damned paper stamped. I knew I should’ve waited. It didn’t occur to me earlier that running around doing errands late at night would mess with my schedule. My car breaking down had definitely screwed me over.

It was almost midnight, my phone was dead, the streets were empty, and I couldn’t find a damn pay phone. When I asked someone if they knew where I could find one, I got laughed at. When I tried to borrow a phone, well, it didn’t go any better.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I felt a drop of water land on my nose. I closed my eyes, and sighed deeply, cursing my roommate Kat for sending me out in the first place. She was too busy stalking her new love interest—who had so far shown no interest—to go out and run her own errands.

I had been forced to go to city hall just before they closed at five. New management had been the excuse of why they were unorganized and couldn’t help me. How city hall now had “new management” was beyond me. I hadn’t understood the excuse when it was said to me, and learning that I’d have to return a second day just made things worse.

After that, I was left stranded at the grocery store. First, it had been my debit card—which Kat had borrowed the previous day—getting declined. Things had taken a turn for the worse when I left the store and my car wouldn’t run.

In the parking lot, while sulking for my car, I stumbled across the only guy I had ever liked throughout high school.

I had arrived at Leland three years before, and had completed my junior and senior year at the Leland High. There, I met Jude. I had always thought of Jude as the exception to my all of my boy rules. He was nice and smart and serious. He appreciated school, just like I did. He had once told me it was hard to find a girl to date. Everyone was too fake and overrated. He wanted different. I ultimately got friend-zoned when he said that it sucked that I was too much like one of the guys. And suck it did.

On senior year, Jude started dating Crystal—everything a guy would want in a girl, except for the brains, good humor, nice attitude, some compassion, and decency. But she came wrapped in a nice, plastic package. Crystal was as mean as they came, if not worse. But Jude was stupefied by her two massive… attractions, just like the rest of the boys at school. Crystal loved the attention, and she frequently flaunted the only “redeeming quality” that she had.

The crush I’d had on Jude went away, more or less. But I’d always been stuck with a bitterness that burned right through me every time I saw them together. Jude didn’t make it easy. He considered me a friend, and he thought the world of Crystal. No matter what I said to myself, I couldn’t pull a Crystal on him—I couldn’t act like a bitch. I always had to put on a fake smile and make small talk, while looking for a quick way out of the situation.

I had only managed to buy two bags of groceries with the forty dollars I’d thankfully been carrying in my purse. It had still been embarrassing when I told the cashier that I couldn’t afford everything I had in the cart, or how the people in the long line behind me had been annoyed. To sum it up, my day had been crap. Just when I kept assuming things couldn’t get any worse, they did.

Not too surprisingly, it happened again.

It didn’t start raining immediately. I would feel a drop once in a while. The problem, and what should’ve frightened me, was when I decided to take a short cut home. I took a turn in a street that was poorly lit.