Letters She Wrote | Outer Banks

𝐢𝐯. 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐝 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞

[ iv. the long road home ]

➸➸➸

UNLIKE THE SEVERAL OTHER dozens of frantic, terrified teenage kooks, pogues and tourons that had previously run from the Boneyard beach at the sight of a loaded gun, Willa Deveraux found that she could only walk away from the scene of lost bloodshed.  Unlike the others that had fled as if the wind had carried them away itself, her movements were slow, groggily and uneven, her feet dragging in the endless, milky white sand like she was being held down by cinder blocks.  She was a ghost on the shore of an empty beach; once a home for the young, wild and reckless, but now only a place full of horrified realities and stolen fantasies.

There was no longer a swirl of a raging storm in Willa's heart, no longer the burn of the cinnamon whiskey in her empty stomach to alight the flames in her soul.  There was nothing to be felt at all, her emotions now locked away in the same closet where her unsent letters lied.  Willa's lungs were tight, the air so impossibly cold on her shallow cheeks.  She could still taste the salt from her tears on her cracked, bitten lips.

Willa was barefoot as she walked back to the Figure Eight, alone and rattled in her own steps, having completely forgotten about her abandoned flip flops resting idly in the sand somewhere behind her.  They were likely near her old, familiar, and warm piece of driftwood, but now such a place could only remind her of the cold—of the potential loss of life—and Willa now knew she was far better off without the lime green shoes.  There was nothing that could make going back to the Boneyard worth it, not even if John B. Routledge was still likely passed out in the sand, broken and bleeding from his brutal fight with Topper Thornton.

Willa abruptly shook her own head, shifting her sandy knots around her head, refusing to acknowledge nor analyze the violence from all that she had just witnessed. She had to keep her pale, sage green eyes forward, always looking ahead.  She remained on the beach as she moved north, both to keep from walking on the pavement that may cut at her feet, and to avoid being seen by any of the townspeople.  The last thing that Willa needed was for word to get back to her mother that she had been caught on the south side of the island in the dead of night.

Curling her hands tightly into fists, Willa could feel that she was missing a thumb ring.  Without having to look, she that knew it was her thick, silver banded ring that had been crafted to twist and curl intricately into the design of a fallen magnolia leaf.  While magnolia trees were Willa's favorite, the ring itself had never been Willa's favorite.  But it had been a gift from her father all the same, a gift that had once proven to Willa that, perhaps, her father paid more attention to her and her interests than she once gave him credit for.  The silver crusted magnolia ring had also been the newest piece of her gaudy collection, it had been the final ring she put on before every outing, a home on her last formerly bare finger.  Now, even though it was a single, minuscule and rather ugly type of ring, Willa felt naked without it.