Adrenaline.

2.

                                  T W O

✧

We stood in front of two pristine, expensive looking cars. I stared at them, gobsmacked, wondering how two young boys could afford something so glamorous and luxurious.

They chop up young girls and sell their body parts to the black market.

Shut up. Please.

No.

The yellow beams swirled onto the shiny material, making tiny sparkles light up everywhere. The little sparkles danced around, making me feel that same sense of ease that I had felt earlier.

The color yellow was overwhelmingly beautiful to me. When the school had painted over my locker, they used yellow. The original color of the locker was red, and everyone else's remained red, except mine. My yellow covered up the one thing that shakes me to my core. The word "skank" wasn't just some corny insult that girls call each other over instagram because one of them flirted with the other's boyfriend.

My "skank" brought me back. Every time. Hearing the word brought me back to that very moment, with Jared, in his bed. People continuously shout that word at me because of how I react, but they have no idea what really happened and what that word does to me.

You think you know sadness, until you've been through it. It gets under your skin and lives inside of you, making the simplest of tasks become the hardest. You can't speak, feel, or do anything. You're just there, wallowing in your own misery. There's no escape, and there's not much you can do to change it. So, you just sit there, and desperately wait for something so small and simplistic to camouflage that feeling for just a moment.

Something so small that it can simply be a coating of paint on your locker.

Yellow, the beautiful, oxidized yellow that was painted onto my locker. It covered my one nightmare that is usually impossible to get out of my head. The only time I could notice the engraved word was when I wanted to. And that's what makes all the difference. It was liberating, almost. As if for once, I finally had some type of control over the word and what it gets to do to me.

I continued to stare at the cars, in complete awe.

"You like what you see?" Justin questioned with an expression on his face that seemed as if he was looking for my approval. I nodded my head and he looked down, disappointed at my reaction.

He wanted to impress me.

The thing is, I wasn't impressed because when I looked at his car, the only thing that came to mind is how he got the car.

You know how, Nova.

"How'd you get that thing?" I asked.

"Oh, you mean that piece of junk?" he stated sarcastically, trying to make me crack a smile. My lips curved slightly, but the curiosity was still eating me alive as if I was an old piece of bark, and my curiosity was a small termite.

"No, really. How?" I mumbled, trying to sound like I wasn't freaking out on the inside. He chuckled lowly and shook his head at me, "Curiosity killed the cat, Nora."

See, he doesn't even care enough to remember your name.

"Um, I'm Nova," I snapped, sending him a glare.

"My bad," he muttered, not really caring about what I had to say. I grunted and looked the other way. A man appeared from the crowd and strutted towards me, stomping his steel-toed, leather boots on the pavement as if he was some intimidating man.