LETTERS SHE WROTE.
❝I hope that someday when I am gone,
someone, somewhere, picks my soul up
off of these pages and thinks:
I would have loved her. ❞
OUTER BANKS.
BOOK ONE of the LETTERS TRILOGY.
[ SEASONS 1 - 2 ]
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I do not own any rights to Ou...
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[ xvi. bury the dead ]
➸➸➸
THE COLOR OF JOHN B. Routledge's bandanna was a deep navy blue. But ragged and tattered through many years of use and scratchy from too many washes, Willa Deveraux soon came to realize that the thick fabric had since lost much of its original shade.
Initially when the bandanna had been handed to her, Willa was not sure why she had noticed these strange details—why they suddenly mattered to her when she had never considered them before—but it surely might have had something to do with the fact that the deep navy color was now spotted and tainted. Tainted by a coppery red color, making the small cloth stiff in odd places and incredibly wet and sticky in others. Before that afternoon, John B.'s bandanna had been clean, but now it was stained entirely in Willa's own blood.
Willa slowly let her tearful, heavy-lidded eyes flicker away from the wadded-up bandanna in her scraped palm, and onto her rings which were now scuffed and dirty from her fall—from her attack. Blood had dried beneath her chipped fingernails, and now Willa was unsure if it was her own or her assailant's. For the briefest moment, Willa hoped it was her own blood; she hoped that she had not drawn an X onto her own back by piercing the skin of the gunman, leaving him with a deadly vengeance against her. But then she thought otherwise. Willa knew the dried blood beneath her fingernails and etched into the crevices of her fingers belonged to the gunman. She had stabbed him with her keys. She had fought back. She had survived and she would not belittle herself of that minuscule victory by the fear of the unknown.
"So, how's it workin' out, kid?"
Pulled from her rattled thoughts by the sound of Susan Peterkin's inquiring and formal tone, Willa could not help but look up from where she sat alone in the backseat of the sheriff's vehicle. The question was directed towards John B., who now sat tiredly but alert in the passenger's seat, quietly thankful to even be breathing. After Peterkin had joined Willa on the opposite side of the chain link fence, the sheriff had slowly helped the petrified young girl back to her feet, and they had worked together to carry a somewhat coherent John B. into her awaiting vehicle. In the time that it took for John B. to slowly regain consciousness, Peterkin had helped Willa to bandage up her bleeding knees in the back of the car, and had untied John B.'s bandanna from around his neck so that she may use it for her own bleeding chin. Though grateful for Peterkin's help, Willa remained silent throughout the ordeal, allowing the older woman to do her work as she secretly kept her own attention to the ailing John B., wondering if the Routledge boy was even responsive enough to notice that his bandanna was gone yet.
"It's a whole lot safer if you give it to me than anybody else," Peterkin continued cautiously when neither teenager opted to response, daring to break the silence of the vehicle once more.
