Adopted by that OneBand! | ✔️

The week goes by

Cheryl's POV -

We didn’t get any time to talk the rest of the day either, as we didn’t share any classes. I met up with Lily at the end of the day outside the school gates.

“How’re you going home?” She asked me.

“My brother’s coming to pick me up, I think.” I said. Sure enough, I saw Niall’s black convertible parked somewhere up the road, probably because he wanted to avoid attention.

“Ooooh! Can I meet him? His family adopted you, right?”

“Um, sorry. He’s kinda, uh, sick right now. Maybe next time?”

“Fine then! Lily said, “By the way, ask your parents if you can come to my house tomorrow after school!”

“I will, thanks for inviting me!” I smiled and waved at Lily. “See you tomorrow!”

I kept the smile on my face until I got to the car, for Lily’s sake. My smile immediately turned upside down when I went inside the car.

“Hey, I see you’ve survived!” Niall said, starting the car.

“Barely.” I replied. “And I see you’ve learnt how to drive to my school."

“I did,” Niall chuckled. “How was school then? It can’t be too bad, can it? I saw you made a friend! You were talking with that girl wearing a green baseball cap.”

“Yup, she’s Lily and she’s awesome, but that’s basically the only good part of today. You’ll never believe what happened.”

“What?”

“There’s this mean popular girl at school, Katie Harvey. And today at lunchtime, she said my mother and her father were siblings. She accused me and Reggie of killing my parents. Then she said she’d get me back. Her dad’s violent, I know it. I’m in trouble. We all are. I’m scared. I don’t want to get hurt again. I thought everything would be fine when I got adopted. I thought what was past was past.” Tears unnoticed by both of us were streaming down my face.

“Well, I don’t know how to react. Are you sure she’s just not winding you up?” Niall said.

“I can feel that she's not." I said, wiping my tears. "When she was talking to me, I can see a glint in her eyes, just like my mother used to have before whenever she hurt me. If you've been through what I've been through, you'd seen it too."

At this time, we were already pulling up to the driveway to our home.

"You go tell the other boys about this issue, and we'll figure something out together, OK?" Niall told me.

I nodded, then jumped out of the car. I found the boys in the living room.

“Hey, you’re back!” They said, coming over to hug me. “Tell us about your day!”

“Well, the good thing was I made a friend, called Lily. She’s great fun to hang out with. But something really terrible happened too.”

I repeated to them what Katie said, and they all looked quite shocked.

“This is really serious.” Said Liam grimly. “This Katie sounds evil.”

“I’m really scared.” I said quietly. “I’m afraid they’ll somehow forbid you to adopt me and I’ll need to go live with them instead. Then they’ll torture me to death.”

“Don’t think about it, Cher.” Said Harry, patting me on the shoulder. “As we said before, no one’s gonna take you away from us.”

“How about you ignore this Katie person for now and just go to school normally,” Zayn suggested, “If she really hurts you then we’ll do something about it.”