The Woods At Night

Chapter 23

We load the few boxes I have into the car and grab the suitcase of Vivian's things from the guest room. We leave early in the morning and start to drive the long way back to the city. I look out the window and watch as the forest, my summer, and Kai, all fly away into the distance. I look to my left where Vivian is sitting, staring out her own window. We spend most of the car ride driving in silence.
Once we get to Vivian's house the sun is rising again. I napped so much in the car that I don't even know what day it is anymore and at this point I don't care.
Rumors spread about Nate as soon as the school year started. There was a special announcement during the first week telling people Nate was in prison for murder and to be especially nice to Vivian and I because what happened involved us. Fucking assholes could have asked if we wanted that before doing it. People treated us with way too much pity and asked us way too many questions for the whole first month of school, some of Nate's friends even blamed me for treating him badly. Easy thing for them to say, he didn't kill people they gave a shit about. Eventually people just started to leave us alone in school, Vivian's parents, who became my adoptive parents, got me a bed and my own room. On the last day of school Vivian was taken to the hospital halfway through the day when her water broke. Luckily, she was basically alone when it happened, I was with her but it was just after everyone got to class other than us so nobody else was around. I was walking in the halls with her because we wanted to just talk instead of saying goodbye to classmates we didn't care about and signing yearbooks. She had her baby and over the summer we got to learn how tough it is to deal with an infant. In the end, Vivian did a good job raising Ehren.
After a while I lost contact with my friends from Lucky Tree other than Amy and Jen, who came to visit the city during summer breaks. Apparently when they came out of the closet they were disowned by the whole town and forced out of Lucky Tree, last I heard they got an art studio together on the outskirts of LA and lived gayly ever after.
Over time I grew up, alongside Vivian. Although we never forgot and her scars never fully healed, we moved on. Ehren always brags that their mother is a pirate.
I never really got over Kai, but I pushed the thoughts of him away and sort of forgot for a while. I met a man who loved me and I loved him back almost as much as I loved Kai. We got a house together, we got pets together, and eventually he even convinced me to have a kid with him, we name him Spiro. I didn't know at the time that just five years later I'd be explaining to that same kid why his other dad would never come home with us from the hospital. This is what made all the memories of Kai and Lucky Tree come flooding back, so out of curiosity, I decided to go back to the town of Lucky Tree to see what had become of it. Even if everyone there is a homophobic bitch, I don't have a boyfriend anymore, so nobody would know. So we pack our things, and start to drive back to the place where my best and worst summer ever took place.