She knew she could never love him that way, and this thought alone ripped up her insides. How simple this love would be, how perfect, as time had molded them together, each sharing the pains and joys of growing up together. It was if they would create this unstoppable force, one that millions of people spend their lives in search of, only to die alone.

Yet, she just couldn’t be that person. Such a twisted and warped irony, that forced deep pockets of air out of Ashley’s mouth. It would be so easy to love Aiden, to save him, to save herself…but it would be a lie. And Ashley had lived with so many lies that there just wasn’t any more room. She could twist the truth with the best of them, maybe even better than Spencer, but she was tired; so utterly weak from this fiction, this surreal tapestry of moments in time, as if she had lived the life of hundreds of different people, forced to experience their world without the proper ammunition, stationed on the front line minus a helmet and carrying a musket stuffed with mud.

The tree outside continued to tap against the glass, as each girl stood, glued to their previous positions, eyes on the floor.

Spencer shifted again and began to stare Ashley down, Ash sensing her eyes locked upon her figure, her tracter beam set to high, attempting to suck the thoughts from her head.

Aiden’s face popped inside her head again, a flash of memory; Aiden’s pale hand on the doorknob of Spencer’s front door. Her teeth began to grind against one another, her jaw throbbing from the pressure, as she tried to soak up Aiden’s pain with her mouth. Her mood was transforming into something unrecognizable, something unpredictable and hateful. Ashley felt it coming, building up inside her like molten lave, ready to explode from within at a speed and pace more violent than she could ever imagine.

It was all culminating within her bowels, all of it. Her hands clenched together as she remembered her mother in the front seat of the car, glancing back at her from the side mirror, her pained face full of emotion, yet her body remained stationary, unmoving, unable and not wanting to give Ashley what she needed as Ashley dabbed her bloody lip with the bottom of her tee-shirt. No hand snaked back, secretly, between the passenger seat and the door, fingers brushing her thirteen year old knee, a touch of comfort amidst the dirty, bitter, suffocating air of the car.