The Devil's Trap

Chapter 20: Take a Stand

Would this be considered a long chapter or a short chapter? I feel like it was more of a short chapter. Still, I feel happy to remember how powerful I felt when speaking to Aristotle. It makes me laugh to know that he thought he had the upper hand. 

I defended myself and told him that I didn't do anything wrong. That Aristotle didn't know how much he was causing problems for me, that he has hurt two of my friends, and tried to get everyone on his side despite them not knowing the whole story. In fact, I even told Aristotle that he was wrong too, since he didn't know everything that happened and just started to yell at me for no reason.

Aristotle stared at me with wide eyes and tried to say it was my fault again, but I made it clear to him that I didn't want to go back and forth on this.

"Is that all you wanted to say to me?" I ask as I stared straight into Aristotle's mixed green and blue eyes. Aristotle didn't speak, but just broke the eye contact and looked down at the floor, an unreadable look plastered on his face.

I felt numb inside but I also knew that I was strong for standing in front of him. I was proud of myself and I knew I was ready to walk away without feeling like I was to blame.

"Yeah, that's all." Aristotle said in a quiet tone.

"Okay, because you don't know what he has put me through. You were not there from the beginning and I know that he is not the one who is truly hurt. Now, I'm going to go see my brother." I say in a clear voice and walk towards the assembly, never looking back.

Aristotle never made the attempt of talking to me again, but I think that had something to do with Ryan talking to him about leaving me alone.

A lot of time had passed after the Aristotle event. He has not tried to talk or text me, so I was happy with that. School was still hard and my family life wasn't getting much better, but I felt as if I'll be okay since Jeremiah and I knew that we still had feelings for each other and were willing to wait. Well, it was hard to wait for him for so long, but I had to keep reminding myself that Jeremiah wants to be with me and we will be together in the end.

And we did get back together, just later in the summer. We are still together and it's been about seven months. I'm happy with him.

Everything was going well, despite Amaya's sudden cold attitude towards the group. There was one more unfortunate event that he was going to cause and when it happened, I felt as if no one cared and that I should stop caring about everyone too.

I remember that Amaya walked ahead of the group during lunch and went to go sit on a hill by herself. Amaya and I have talked before and she has told me that she was upset about what he did when she was finally told the truth of the things he did to all of us. Amaya didn't want him to be in the group, almost as much as I didn't want him there.

But he still came back and tried to talk to all of us.