Summer Days to An End

Chapter X.

"Lo, why are you so mad at me?" Selah started once the three had made it back to their suite, and understandably, Lo ignored her question, changing her clothes as she started to get ready for bed. Having sensed a soon-to-come fight, Miyo remained silent as she watched them both carefully.

"Lo, say something." She persisted in asking, as did Lo in brushing her off.

"Damn it Lo, answer me!" Selah's anger had mounted at last as she shouted, her reaction briefly startling Lo as Miyo's eyes widened at the scene.

"You don't have the right to be angry at the moment, so calm down," Lo uttered in a tempered, yet unshaken voice. "This is all your fault, if you had just shut up this morning, things wouldn't have gone the way they did."

"Shut up about what? What did I say that could have made you act like th-"

"You knew, didn't you?" Lo began in the middle of her speech.

"Knew what?" Selah resumed, a dumbfounded expression spread across her face.

"You knew that Finn had feelings for you! You pretended to play stupid as if you hadn't a clue about it, just to make me embarrass myself in front of him!" Lo screamed in her face with fury as Miyo and Selah took a step back, the two of them only then realizing what had really happened.

A heavy silence swept through the room; a silence so strong you could hear the sound of the elevator doors sliding open at the other end of the hallway outside of their room. For what seemed like years, the silence remained between them, as even Miyo felt that there was nothing that could be said to continue the discussion at hand.

"Wait, Finn has feelings for me? I, I don't believe it." started Selah in a whisper.

"Of course you don't; why should you? You're not the one who lives the closest to him. You're not the one who would ride with him to school. You're not the one who understands all that he's been through. You're not the one who would always be thinking about him." Lo's voice responded with a burdening sadness as her eyes pointed to the ground beneath her feet, tears streaming from her deep blue eyes and onto her cream-colored cheeks.

"In fact, you hardly know anything about him. All of you: long before any of you could even say you knew his name, I was always there with him. Yet still, he chose you." She continued as she fell to the ground, burying her head in her chest as she began to sob.

"Lo, don't say that. We know none of us have known Finn as long as you have, but that doesn't mean we're any less of friends to him, or that he cares more about one of us than another." Miyo attempted to console her, slowly walking towards her as she reached out her hand to lift her up.

Without a second thought, Lo smacked her hand away from her, as Miyo pulled her arm back to her side to see if any damage had been done, which luckily there was none.

Both devastated and enraged, Lo stood from the ground, wiping her eyes with the sleeves of her shirt as she walked to the side of her bed, lifting the sheet as she silently got underneath it.

"Selah, let it be known that it should be in your best interest to stay away from me for the rest of this trip. From this moment on, I want absolutely nothing to do with you or Finn." were her last words before she drifted off to sleep, before a stunned Selah and a fearful Miyo did the same within the minutes afterward.

On the other side of their wall however, a distraught Finn Bartlett had overheard the entire conversation.

The next morning, Selah and Miyo awoke to find Lo's bed empty, the white sheets spread carefully across the mattress along with her phone atop its surface.