[ iv. the long road home ]

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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.

"Willa?"

At the sudden calling of her own name—the voice sharp, quick and cold like a whip—Willa carefully looked to her far right.  Her eyes were frozen near a tiny clump of darkly swaying trees, fearing, somehow, that JJ Maybank and his gun-toting crew had truly followed her, ensuring that she did make it back to her side of the island—the kook side of the island.

But to her relief, JJ did not step out of the trees, brandishing the handgun that she had previously slapped out of his trembling hands, stopping him from potentially it using anymore than he already had.  No, instead, it was only her little brother; her baby brother, Cruz Deveraux.  The thin, but muscular, drunken and black-haired, fifteen-year-old boy was alone, standing in the shadows of the trees.  Protecting himself from the dangers of a loaded gun?  That was obvious.  Abandoned by his pogue friends that could not follow him to the north side of the island?  That, too. 

Cruz Deveraux's small face was contorted in both fear and joy; happy to see his sister, safe and alive, but so terrifyingly afraid of what might have happened if he had not been able to find her in the aftermath of so many fleeing, shrieking bodies.  "Oh, my God," Willa sighed.  In an instant, her body was no longer as heavy as it had previously been.  She quickly crossed over to Cruz, kicking up sand around her as she hastily pulled him into a tight and warm embrace.

In all of the parties that Willa had been to across the spacious Outer Banks territories, never once had she ever faced the very real, very sinister threat of a gun.  Sure, fights were common—so common that someone usually had a med-kit lying around to clean up the aftermath—but never once had one been broken up by the threat of a bullet to the back of the head.  Willa could not shake the terrifying image from her mind of the rage on JJ's face, of the fear in Topper's own expression, knowing that his entire kook world rested in the hands of a pogue.  JJ could have pulled the trigger.  Willa had seen the opportunity, had felt that he wanted to.

But could she blame him?  Even from their elementary school days the existence of the enemy tribes had been very prevalent, and JJ had never been graced with the ability to fly under the radar.  He had been a target for the kooks since day one, and the hot-headed boy was never one to stray away from a fight.  It was only a matter of time before a kook or a pogue crossed the line, and in the end it had been JJ.  Willa did not even want to know where he had managed to find the weapon, or who had given it to him.  She highly doubted that it was a legal possession, given the roots that ran so poisonously deep in JJ's own Maybank family tree.

"Are you okay?" Willa asked softly, pulling back slightly from her brother.  Her hands were placed firmly on both sides of his face, turning his head side-to-side, searching over his body as if he had been nicked by straw bullet, even though that was impossible when Willa knew that JJ had only fired into the stars above their heads.  There was no way that any of them could have gotten hurt.  Willa knew that her little brother was fine, knew that—somewhere—Ace was fine, too, and she also knew that she was fine, but regardless of any promise she attempted to tell herself, of any sign from the physical world that promised she still held breath, she did not feel fine on the inside.

"Am I okay?" Cruz retorted, frowning in disbelief.  "Are you okay?" He shot back, jerking her shoulders slightly.  "Why didn't you run?!"

"I . . . I . . ." Willa trailed off, letting her teeth fall back together with a gentle snap.  There was no way that Cruz would ever understand that she had not run simply because of him, because she had to ensure that he lived, even if that had meant she did not.  He would never forgive her if he had learned that she had thrown her own life on the chopping block in place of his.  But she always would.  Willa would have done anything for Cruz.  That was what big sisters did, that was what best friends did for each other.  " . . . I don't know," She finally said.  "I guess . . . I guess I just froze.  I was scared."

Cruz's face softened, falling easily for Willa's bluff, and he immediately pulled his sister back into his arms in hopes of comforting her.  His hands were pressed softly against her back and Willa buried her face in his shoulder, attempting to hide her tears in the fabric of his shirt, praying that they were soaked up by the time she was forced to pull back.  "It's okay now," Cruz soothed gently in her ear.  "We're safe now."

Willa nodded and swallowed a knot in her throat. After a long moment of pure, comforting silence between the Deveraux siblings, Willa pulled back and looked away, back towards the water of the open sea beyond the island, hoping that her tear streaks had finally dried. "Mom and dad can't find out about this," She murmured.

"Do you think Ace will tell?" Cruz questioned from over her shoulder.

"No," Willa answered, and she was certain in her answer.  There would be no benefits for Ace Deveraux if he told Maren and Alden Deveraux the truth of what had happened at the Boneyard.  He would only be hammering the nails into his own coffin if he dared to try explain why he had snuck out to a party on the south side, why he reeked of alcohol and marijuana, and why he had been anywhere near so much violence that resulted in gunfire.  To attempt explaining to two parents who otherwise believed their child could do no wrong was suicide, and Willa knew that Ace was not willing to lose the tiny piece of freedom he held over his other siblings.  "He'd only get himself in trouble," She explained.

"He'd get us in trouble, too," Cruz pointed out nervously. "And sometimes that's worth it for him.  If he can just—"

"He won't, okay?"

Cruz swallowed, taken aback by the sudden sternness in Willa's own tone.  "Okay," He reluctantly complied.

In the quiet, eerie moments of hesitance that lingered in the void of their worried conversation, neither Deveraux sibling now said another word as they both silently agreed that it was time to go home.  They had been exposed on the sandy beach for far too long and Willa was almost certain that someone, anyone, had to have likely seen her by now.  If she managed to survive this night without it ever coming up again in the future, it would be an absolute miracle.  And Willa did not tend to believe in miracles.

Following Willa's prior path, the brother and sister stuck close to each other as they waded through the soft sand, following the edge of the sea as far as it could take them.  After a short while, Willa finally untied her navy coat from around her waist and zipped herself up, though it did little to protect her from the cold. No, for Willa, the coldness resided deep inside her, festering like a squall on the horizon, growing and growing as it raged into a storming, unstoppable hurricane, ready to drown all that Willa knew the Outer Banks to hold dear.

Willa was unsure of how much time had passed before Cruz opted to speak again, the boy likely becoming too unstable in his own head, in his own nightmares.  "I thought JJ was going to shoot Topper," He confessed aloud, quiet as a whisper, fearful that even the tall, mansion-like beachfront houses at the far end of coast could hear him.

"He wanted to," Willa whispered back, looking carefully to Cruz.  He was already frowning back at her.

"How could you tell?" He wondered.

"I don't think anyone else saw it," Willa began timidly.  "But after the beach had cleared and it was just him, and his friends, and Topper and Sarah . . . and me . . ." She hesitated, choosing her next words carefully, not wanting to tell Cruz the truth of how the weapon had been discarded in the fallout. "After JJ put the gun down, he looked at me, Cruz." Willa swallowed tightly then, daring to relieve the raw moments in the darkness of her mind.  Lightning bolts of icy blue peered back at her in the shadows.  "His eyes were so sad."

"I'm sorry you had to see that," Cruz murmured apologetically.  He could not dare begin to imagine what his sister felt, what she had truly seen in the exposed light of the pogue nature.  She had seen a side that even Cruz—who was closer to a pogue than he ever was a kook—had not yet seen.

And in the midst of that realization, in the midst of uncovering a world that had been hidden so cruelly by the harshness and ignorance of the Outer Banks, all that Willa Deveraux found herself wanting to say was: I'm not.

Because she was not sorry for witnessing JJ's rage.  She was not sorry for witnessing JJ's undying loyalty to his friends, to his chosen family, who would always undeniably do the same for him.  No, Willa was only sorry that JJ Maybank had ever been forced to act in such a feral way.  She was sorry that his anger and fury was all that he knew, that he had been molded into the ghost of a boy that he had always feared to inevitably become.

Willa opted not to respond to Cruz, letting the conversation die between themselves once more.  Willa was tired of tonight, she wanted it to be over and done with, and if that meant sprinting for the Figure Eight, then, by God, so be it.  But her body no longer carried the strength to run, for while she believed herself to be mostly sober, she was still very heavily intoxicated.  She could smell her own breath as she exhaled through her open mouth and she grimaced, knowing that she would very much be regretting all that Fireball whiskey come the morning.

Now trapped in their own thoughts, it was a long road home for Willa and Cruz Deveraux.  To their left the teenagers could hear nothing but the open sea; the waves rising and falling as they spoke to one another, in their crescendos they whispered of the gunshots that had echoed out into the horizon, each exploding bullet lighting up the sky like its own dying star.  And to their right, an entirely different unsuspecting world waited, lost in broken and faded light of the kooks overtaking the land of the pogues.  In the aftermath of the hurricane, much of the south side of the island had lost their power, but the north side was slowly rebuilding.  Off in the distance, beyond the mounds and mounds of untouched sand, Willa could see her own home, dazzling like a beacon, like its own lighthouse in the dark of the Outer Banks shadows. Endless generators kept the Figure Eight alive and thriving, even as the rest of the island was stuck in a seemingly permanent summer storm slump.

Slowly but surely, the Deveraux siblings moved up and out of the sand, and began the long trek up towards their driveway.  Despite how awful the Deveraux mansion was on most days, they were both more than happy to finally be able to let their guards down—for the most part—and finally rest. 

There were three very expensive cars sitting lonely in the dark of the cobblestone driveway when the siblings reached the house; their mother's sleek, gray SUV, Hudson's cherry red convertible, and the polished, white Jeep Wrangler shared between Willa and Ace.  There was usually another navy blue truck in the drive also, but their father had been pulled back to the hospital on a swing shift after the chaos of the hurricane, willingly offering to help any Outer Banks occupants that might have been injured in the storm.  Thankfully, it was a good thing that Alden Deveraux was gone.  Whenever he was home, he was a night owl and he surely would have been waiting up for his runaway children when they drunkenly poured through the door—as he had already done many times before.

Willa led the way up the porch steps.  "What time is it?" She called over her shoulder.

Cruz glanced down at his phone.  "A little after three."

"Oh, Jesus," Willa grumbled.

With Cruz annoyingly breathing down her neck, Willa hastily typed in the four-digit code into the pad beneath the doorknob and held her breath, dreading the tiny whine of the machine as it unlocked the glass door from within, allowing the two drunken siblings into the Deveraux home. To her relief, all of the lights downstairs were off, and their mother and father's room was across the living room, far from the staircase that Willa and Cruz needed to get to.

Without a single word, Willa started for the stairs, leaving Cruz to lock the door back up behind her.  She took her time with the steps, holding tightly to the banister as the world started to spin in the pitch black of the home.  Knowing the exact places on the floorboards that creaked the most, Willa moved carefully, shifting her sloppy weight as slowly as she could.  But by the time she reached the top of the stairs, all of her careful antics had been futile by the fact that Cruz simply jogged up the stairs after her, completing forgetting that dawn was nearly upon them.

"You idiot!" Willa hissed.

Cruz merely waved her off, and she could now see by his phone light that he was a lot more drunk than she had initially thought.  In the heat of the moment and the fear of the beach, it was easy to believe that one was sober, that one was level-headed, but Willa still had to remember that Cruz had been nursing an entire fifth of vodka to himself for most of the night.  And she had downed a fifth of whiskey.  By God, they were both disasters, two drunken kids that had been forced to become adults so abruptly, but now that facade was quickly slipping away once more.

Standing there, breathing hard as she stared at her swaying little brother, Willa should have been surprised that he did not fall back down the staircase as quickly as he climbed it.  "Yeah, yeah," Cruz finally sighed, turning for his own bedroom.  "Good . . . night."

"Take some Advil," Willa called after his retreating figure.

Whether Cruz heard her advice or not, only time would tell. Willa waited until he had closed his bedroom door before she finally allowed her shoulders to droop and exhaled a long, tight breath she had been holding.  With her ears and mind still buzzing with the waves and the gunshots, Willa finally went into her own room, her hands and knees trembling with such profound fear that she collapsed to the carpeted floor on the other side of the door as quickly as it closed behind her. And in the silence of the hallway beyond her bedroom, Willa's sob echoed in the dark. 

And as both of the teenage Deveraux siblings attempted to settle back into their beds for the night, both remained completely unaware that another pair of tiny watchful Deveraux eyes had been watching them the whole entire time.

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THE NEXT MORNING, WILLA Deveraux was disastrously and painfully hungover.

Her head was a throbbing, spinning mess; as if one of the Deveraux family's construction crew members had taken a break from his actual work to drill her skull with a jackhammer instead.  The pain was so bad, had been so bad, that she had not been able to fall asleep since getting home, and had been forced to aimlessly suffer as she lied wide awake in her bed, tossing and turning as uneasily as her own stomach did.

Throughout the long, nauseating night, her life had formed to become a series of unfortunate events.  From the hours of three-til-four, Willa had done nothing but cry helplessly against her bedroom door, trying to cope with the madness of the night prior from the Boneyard.  From the hours of five-til-seven in the morning, Willa's maniacal, drunken crying had suddenly stopped, and she then spent her lonely time within her tiny bathroom, throwing up her guts that burned of cinnamon.  Forming off of that disaster, from the hours of eight-til-ten, Willa had slept very unsoundly against her toilet bowl, the coolness of the porcelain becoming the only surface capable of cooling her warm and clammy skin.  At ten, she promptly woke up again and threw up some more, and now, finally, nearing one in the afternoon, her capsizing body had seemed to settle.  Now capable of walking on her own two feet, she had retreated back into the comfort of her own bed, but not without placing a trashcan near her sandy, knotted head first.

And as Willa was finally—finally!—about to fall asleep once more, and hopefully stay that way for the rest of the Saturday, a shrill voice filled her ringing ears, startling her awake once more.

"Willa!  There's someone here to see you!"

At the sound of her mother's calling from downstairs, Willa Deveraux turned lightly in her blankets, her eyes snapped wide open.  She stared dazedly at the closed door of her closet, feeling the knots in her stomach clench and unclench.  She would rather throw up on her unexpected guest than ever be forced to talk to them in the state she was currently in.

"Willa!" Her mother tried again.

To Willa's surprise, despite the urgency in her mother's voice, Maren Deveraux did not sound entirely disgusted, meaning that whoever waited at the front door was someone considered acceptable and approachable in her own book.  Because to a kook like Maren Deveraux, it was all about appearances and she would rather drop dead than be caught interacting with a pogue, letting them stand idly on her porch, stirring up muck. 

After all, why else would she refuse to give out candy on Halloween night?

The way her mother acted disgusted Willa, but who was she to ever try and stop her?  She was the Maren Deveraux, the wife of a surgeon, and the daughter of a business owner and a lawyer; she was one of the richest—if not already the richest—women in the Outer Banks.  The money of a kook was all that she knew.  Maren would never, ever be able to understand the life of a pogue; it was an entirely different language, a different planet. 

And if Willa—or any of Maren's children, for that matter—dared to defend a pogue against the Deveraux matriarch, they might as well pack their bags to go join them.

Slowly but surely, Willa eventually pulled herself out of her cool bed and changed into a more decent attire; black jersey shorts and a maroon flannel, perfect for a lazy summery Saturday.  As she made for the door—for the briefest moment—Willa looked around in confusion, trying to remember where her lime green flip flops had gone, but then came to an abrupt halt, realizing exactly where they were, and instead finally opted for a pair of black Birkenstocks that she was still attempting to break in.  Thankfully, she was not planning on having to go very far from her house today, so the painful shoes would do—or so she thought.

Making her way downstairs, her mother was gathered in the open foyer, standing just beyond the front door, looking expectantly up at her daughter.  "What took you so long?" She questioned.

"I was cleaning my room," Willa huffed, lying so easily through her teeth. Even when suffering through a hangover, she never skipped a beat. This was not the first time she had ever been forced to lie in the midst of fighting to urge to lose her stomach all over the glossy floor. "I didn't hear you."

"What are you wearing?" Maren demanded next, eyeing her oldest daughter up and down, as if she were expected to walk down a catwalk, rather than just onto her own front porch.  "You have company!—And what is that in your hair?"

Willa Deveraux froze on the bottom step of the marble grand staircase, her sage eyes locking with her mother's stern brown ones.  In all the pogue-versus-kook chaos of last night, Willa had completely forgotten about the chaos of her own idiotic, horrendously beautiful decision to dye her hair pink—or red, as it had so lovingly decided to turn to.  "Uh, nothing," Willa finally answered, her teeth clenched tightly.  "It's just a silly clip-on that I forgot to take out from last night when I was bored and messing around with different hairstyles.  Lila gave it to me the other day."

Another lie, of course.  Willa did not know anyone on the entire island named Lila.

"Well, take it out," Maren urged with a roll of her eyes.  "It looks ridiculous."

Like the sweet daughter she most definitely was not, Willa nonetheless nodded her head in compliance to her mother's stern and pick orders, even though she would actually do nothing of the sort.  Finally stepping off the staircase, Willa brought her fingers up to her hair, curling the bright red strands around her fingertips, and mocked a silly attempt at pulling the clip-on free from her scalp. 

As if.

And when Maren finally turned away from the foyer and disappeared deeper into the massive, maze-like house, Willa hastily crossed to the glass front door and eagerly stepped outside, knowing that anywhere—anywhere in the whole entire world—could be better than in the same room as her overbearing mother.  Or so she thought.  For as Willa finally stepped onto the porch and let the door fall quietly behind her, she turned to her left and abruptly froze, her hand still locked to the doorknob. With bile in her throat, Willa's red-rimmed eyes fell to none other than Kiara Carrera, who was sitting quietly on the Deveraux family's porch swing.

"Hey," She greeted softly.

For a long moment, Willa could not speak. Never in a million years did she ever expect to find Kiara so close to her house ever again.  They were a long-lost friendship, a forgotten story, there was no reason for them to be standing on that porch together, so close to a future that could have been. But they were. Oh, they were. And not without reason. Kiara needed desperately to speak to Willa, to desperately turn the tides of the former night and hope that it did not drag either of them down to the bottom of the ocean.

And so, moving once more into the fray, into the doomsday that was her own existence, Willa Deveraux—a dangerous, looming spark—had finally caught flame, unleashing a catalyst of destruction that had been so, so long in the making.

And it all began with a single greeting of her own to a kook truly not so unlike herself.

"Hi, Kiara."

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let the wives thrive.

willa is just a struggling girl. is she a kook? is a pogue? is she something entirely in between? she has no idea. like we are four chapters in and a girl is already more traumatized than she ever expected to be and the summer is only just getting started.  poor girl, thinking she's gonna get an easy, happy summer.... doesn't work like there on the outer banks.

anyways, i'm going to try and keep this author's note short, so what did y'all think of the chapter?! how are we feeling about willa? if her scatterbrain kind of feels all over the place to readers with her constant reflections of everything, that's a good thing. willa is puzzled, doesn't know what she's supposed to feel, doesn't know if she should feel good or bad about a certain thing, and that's just her. as she begins to find her footing, you'll be able to feel it.

so what're y'all thinking?! what's kiara got to say? what do you hope to see from willa and her people next?? i'd love to hear your thoughts and what you'd like to see next! so please, leave some votes and comments because your girl would really appreciate it! thanks for reading! and i hope y'all are having a lovely day or night.

stay safe and stay well.

—B.