warning: triggering themes throughout the story mainly focusing on addiction and depression, please be careful and do not read if you are affected by these themes.
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Everly Spencer believed she would die before she reached the age of twenty.
She believed she would never find love, never go to college, never have children. It wasn't that she didn't want those things, it was that she wholeheartedly believed that she wouldn't make it there. That she wouldn't last. She wasn't happy, and in fact, she couldn't remember the last time she truly had been.
Most people were scared of death, scared of what would happen to them and if it would hurt. But Everly, she was scared of life, she was scared because she knew how much pain it could bring.
She never meant to hurt anyone, and it's not like she wanted to die, and when she had swallowed that bottle of pills she hadn't been thinking clearly, not really, and it was when she'd woken up in a hospital bed with IV attached to her arm that she realized that she wished she hadn't woken up. She remembered the steady thump thump of her heartbeat as it pounded so hard she could feel it throughout her entire body and the way her eyes had burned. She remembered the way her father had looked at her when she'd opened her eyes, the doctors had said that it was a miracle she had woken up, and from that moment forward her dad had called her his miracle.
She wished she could just stop living. It was almost silly, she was only seventeen years old and she'd already had enough of life. A race she'd never asked to be apart of and that she knew she had no chance of winning.
She had to live though, for her dad, for her seven year old brother that relied on her to read him to sleep at night, for Mrs. Winters who lived in the apartment across from them whose daughter she babysat when she had to work the nightshift.
She was guilty for being such a burden on her small family, guilty for never being good enough. And then her dad had sent her to rehab, he really meant well, she knew that but she couldn't help but think he just wanted to get rid of her, get rid of the burden that she'd become. And in that moment she knew she wouldn't, couldn't make it to twenty.
But then, she'd met Rue.
It wasn't the romantic bullshit every movie portrays where you meet someone and your entire life turns around and you kiss in the rain and everything's magical and perfect. This wasn't a romcom, it was life in the suberbs of LA. This wasn't a fairytale and Everly was nota princess. It was two teenagers trying to survive in a messed up world where they had been given the worst hands at life. Two teenagers figuring out for themselves and maybe, maybe for eachother that there were reasons to live.
Thinking back on it, her life had really started the summer before junior year. The summer she'd met Rue. The summer they had both ended up in the same rehab facility, for different reasons of course, but they were there together. Both fighting their battles, trying to make it to the next day.
