Still Waters Run Deep

Chapter 12: The Darkest Night

Chapter 12:

The Darkest Night

Thirty days. It doesn't sound like a long time, but it can be an eternity for people watching the clock, impatiently waiting for something. Time only goes by in the blink of an eye if you remember to blink. Emily got into a staring contest with time and she was unyielding in her desire to win. So for her, that month felt like a century.

Everything around her seemed to move forward in rapid succession, but to her it was like hardly any time had gone by. Ali went back to work and Lily went back to school, though Emily could tell Lily wasn't entirely mentally there. She did fine keeping up in her classes, but she'd lost the spark that made her Lily. She had no interest in the track team anymore. She dropped out of her writing club. She wasn't interested in any of the after-school activities she had been jazzed about before Grace's death. In fact, she was barely mentally present when she was in class, but she never said a word about it to either of her mothers. Ali and the rest of her teachers didn't fail to notice how withdrawn she was. She refused to participate in class discussions anymore. When Ali tried to talk to her about it Lily just dismissed her, saying she was just tired or that she didn't have anything to add to the lesson.

Emily and Ali suspected that their friends' children were helping her to the best of their ability. They did not know that they were going above and beyond for her. Levi punched a boy in his gym class in the head when the boy made a snide comment about Grace and the wreck. Levi warned him that if he ever opened his mouth again, especially around Lily that he'd do a lot more than just punch him in the head. When the boy came back at Levi, Kai intervened, backing the younger boy up. Aria and Ezra's son was not known for fighting and violence, but he was very much an intimidating presence, so the other boy backed off immediately. Kai practically had to pull Levi away from the spat.

Harper volunteered herself to be Lily's partner for a class assignment without Lily's knowledge and then did all of the work and turned it in, earning them both very high marks in the class. Iris had followed Lily into the bathroom one day, sensing that something was amiss and found that she'd locked herself in a stall and was having a panic attack. Iris, prissy as she was, didn't care about her designer threads as she crawled on the disgusting floor underneath the stall door to get to her. She had been able to talk Lily down within a matter of minutes.

When Lily would disappear and her friends couldn't find her, Eli always knew where to look. He also knew when she needed to be left alone versus when she needed her friends, so he would gauge how she was feeling before he went looking. Sometimes he'd bring her a snack and leave her alone and other times he'd go sit with her. All in all, they were doing their best to look out for her.

Their parents were doing the same for Ali and Emily. Hanna and Aria stayed on top of all the buzz surrounding their friends. Aria made sure to check in with her writing contacts every day to see if there was anything they needed to cut off before it got to the press. And Hanna was the driving force, seeing to it that any reporter who even dared to try and exploit her friends got a tongue lashing and the threat to never cover any of her big fashion events.

Still, the news loved a tragic story, and they loved spinning it in every possible way that they could. Rumors, of course, were abound. One particularly ugly rumor was that Emily had made up the fact that there even was another car, even though there was concrete proof that there was. The theory was that Emily was lying about it because she'd been distracted while driving and didn't want to take responsibility for her daughter's death. Aria had caught wind of it and immediately got Spencer involved. The two of them had gone in heated, like Thelma and Louise. Spencer had burst into the tabloid headquarters responsible and reamed the shit out of the entire building full of people. She slapped them with a lawsuit for slander and they quickly backed off of their sensationalist stories. The cease and desist surprisingly shut up the tabloids.