[ xiv. informal invitations ]

➸➸➸

DESPITE HER INSISTENT, RAGING desire to stay with JJ Maybank and Pope Heyward on the south side of the Cut to wait out the surely impending arrivals of the Redfield Lighthouse stragglers, John B. Routledge and Kiara Carrera, a maddening Willa Deveraux knew deeply in her disgruntled heart that she needed to go back to her beachfront home in the Figure Eight.

For as much as Willa liked to push the envelope with her dear, unsuspecting parents, rebelling left and right in any which way that she could, the Deveraux daughter had learned long ago—the hard way—that her mother actually suspected a bit more of her than she had originally thought. And while Willa should not have been surprised by her mother's suspicions, given that parents were often rebellious kids themselves, Willa truly never anticipated her own mother would ever be familiar with the idea of sneaking out when Maren, herself, had been raised in such a strict, formal household that forbade such behavior. But ever since Willa Deveraux came home in the middle of the night to a locked front door, back door, and locked windows, all the while Maren waited patiently in the foyer with a smug smirk for her daughter to ring the doorbell in defeat, Willa had been kept on a much tighter leash than the rest of her siblings.

Not that this was entirely unwarranted. This all had happened to Willa when she was only in the seventh grade, of course.

To Willa's relief, the parental restraints had not been nearly as bad as she had expected them to be and they had also very much loosened since she was a meager thirteen-year-old. And with the newfound addition of little Rayne to the family, Maren became distracted by the littlest Deveraux even further. That was why it had gradually become easier to sneak out to the Boneyard. It also helped that the better, more fun parties took place summertime, and under the heat and stress of six children on school break constantly bouncing in and out of her vision, Maren was a little more eager to have her space. Lenient towards giving her children freedom, yes, but still not entirely accepting.

No, Maren Deveraux was still always on the lookout for Willa Deveraux's stupidly rebellious and intoxicatingly playful antics. She would definitely still know if her eldest daughter was up to something if she did not get to see her every 48 hours or so, which is why Willa knew it was better to bite this bullet than push her already risky luck later. After all, if Willa's mother ever found out how she had spent the past two days, Maren would never let her leave the house again—and the entire island would be on lockdown, too.

On the other hand, convincing JJ and Pope to drop her off was also another obstacle in itself. For some reason, because of the simple fact that Willa needed to see her mother, JJ thought she was now part of a conspiracy theory. A kook conspiracy, to be exact. And no, do not even get her started on that chaotic conversation as it unfolded in the backseat of the rusty Volkswagen. Willa wished she could forget it now.

Elsewhere, Pope simply did not want to dare venturing into the Figure Eight if he did not have to. Then again, he did also understand what it felt like to be looked after by an increasingly watchful and invasive parent. His own father was very much the same when it came to restrictions and curfews. Despite Pope's gradual understanding to Willa's plea, JJ did not seem to find that a powerful enough argument—strictly because JJ, as he put it, 'could not fucking relate' to such a type of parent himself. Back and forth, back and forth, the three teenagers continued to bicker as they sped down the highway, but it was not until Willa Deveraux stubbornly took matters into her own hands and tried to grab the wheel from the heated Maybank that JJ finally complied to taking her home.

But not, of course, without swerving onto the perfectly paved asphalt of the Figure Eight to knock over an entire row of filled garbage cans that lined a kook neighborhood along the way, and (as childish as it was to Pope) establishing a sworn oath of secrecy. A promise, composed from bullets and mystery, shared between a Deveraux daughter and a Maybank son that could now withstand the severity of any outside threat.

Now, only a short while later, left alone to the familiar ferocity of the luxurious Figure Eight, the first thing that Willa when she finally got home was take a long-needed shower. Safe in the cool space of her add-on bathroom, only ten steps away from her plum duvet, and her wood-burned bedside table littered with rolling papers, and her tiny locked drawer framed delicately with string-bound letters, Willa allowed herself to let go beneath her steel shower head, the warm water burning away the layers of sweat, and tears, and mud that clung to her battered and trembling body. The water ran dirty and gritty down the drain, swallowing away Willa's pain into a pit of forgotten blackness, but even with her sun-kissed arms wrapped tightly around middle to hold herself surely and upright, Willa felt dangerously small within her pristine bathroom. She felt as if she did not belong; as if she, too, were just another bleeding stain of pink hair dye that still clung to the porcelain of her bathroom sink, searing bright, and bold, and dangerously unwanted against the dullness of the natural ivory-colored surroundings.

For despite how heavily the weight of reality pushed down on her bare shoulders, Willa struggled to put the pieces together. Her tired mind was frazzled, warped around the fact that her life had been in peril. Every time her eyes closed, she saw the familiar glint of a rifle as it reflected back against the dying sunlight, the barrel pointed straight at her, but when her eyes opened again, Willa struggled to accept that such a brutal scene existed beyond her mere imagination. How could she, at only sixteen years old, have been face-to-face with two gunmen who had been more than prepared to kill her?

After all that Willa had experienced in the past two days, how was she still alive? How had no one died since the incident at the Boneyard beach?

Willa Deveraux wished that she could pretend that today or the day before that had not happened, but it could never be that easy for the lost kook girl, now intertwined in a world of chaos with several of her pogue classmates. John B., JJ, Kiara, and Pope were the only four other souls on the entire island that could understand her feelings of confliction. None of them could pretend that life went on when they were now trapped on an island with two potential killers, all of them fighting to hold onto a mysterious compass that could only ever create more problems than solutions.

With no end in sight to this looming catalyst, Willa could now only hope that John B. and Kiara had managed to find any answers at all from the Redfield Lighthouse to supply some shattered light for the darkening tunnel ahead.

➸➸➸

AFTER HER SOBERING SHOWER, her aching bones tingly and cold from water that had long-since lost its warmth, Willa Deveraux retreated briefly to the safety of her comfy bed and allowed her rattling mind to find ease as she trailed absentmindedly upon pages and pages of torn notebook paper. Willa's jeweled fingers twisted delicately as she shifted her silver pen carefully between narrow blue lines, her elbows shifting to rest on her bare, scuffed knees as her back hunched slightly, the girl unknowingly doing whatever she could to become closer to her own written words. Willa sat in this uncomfortable position for nearly an hour, writing down all that she feared to forget in the future, before she finally dared to pull herself out of her bed once more, switch back into a new pair of her own comfortable gray jersey shorts and a sea-green flannel, and face her mother downstairs.

Maren Deveraux was found seated in the open, spotless kitchen with her plush, high-rise chair pushed closely to the island's marble tabletop as she peered closely over a pair of thin-rimmed glasses, and down onto a large, cream-colored event planner. Other varying pages littered with unrecognizable contents were scattered around Maren as well; most of them currently being held down by a sparkling wineglass filled nearly to the brim with deep red liquid, sour and sweet on a bitter tongue.

"Hey, you," Maren greeted, lifting her head as Willa entered the room, the young daughter smiling stiffly in feigned innocence. To her surprise, there was no anger in her mother's worn expression, no disappointment as she looked her second eldest up and down, searching for a flaw in the system of perfection. In the moment, there seemed no blemishes to be found. And rightfully so. Before Willa had gone downstairs, she had smartly chosen to pull her hair back into a low, knotted bun, concealing her vivid red strands beneath bunches of curly locks, and now she felt as if she could take on the world.

"Hey, mom," Willa replied casually—as casually as she dared. The mother and daughter were used to walking on eggshells around one another; and now, politeness could just as easily tear down Willa's facade as her own natural spunky rage. Willa could never be too comfortable, never quite as honest as she might have wanted to be with Maren, but that ship of lost hope for a new beginning had long-since sunk. It did not bother Willa so much anymore, anyways. "What are you doing?" She prodded absentmindedly. Willa moved deeper into the kitchen as her mother's attention dropped back down to the papers, the older woman scribbling something down on a blank corner of her current page. It was as if Maren had not even noticed Willa had been gone . . . and by the dazed look in her eye, tipsy off of too many glasses of wine and drained by the contents that littered the sheets below her, maybe she had not.

"Uh . . ." Maren huffed tiredly, blinking her eyes tightly. "I'm just trying to figure out who's going to be walking in with who."

Willa frowned, coming to a stop on the opposite side of the kitchen and leaning back against the matching marble countertops. "For what?" She wondered.

"Midsummers."

Dread washed thickly down Willa's throat and settled coldly in the empty pit of her stomach at her mother's blunt response. Even after all these years, the end of July always crept up on Willa, and when its scorching grasp finally latched onto her, it did not let go, dragging her down into the absolute shitshow that was the annual Midsummers Ball. It was a traditional party, hosted on the lush, rolling hillsides of the far north end of the Figure Eight, that lasted from dawn til dusk, a celebration bathed in sparkling glamour and splashed with hard liquor. To Willa's aggravated annoyance, Midsummers was strictly a kook event, and any pogue outsiders were merely the staff, forced to be there because they could not scrounge up a paycheck any other way.

Willa Deveraux utterly despised Midsummers. Even though she had only been to a single one—the summer prior as a baby freshman—it had still surely been enough to torture Willa for the rest of her miserable, lavished life. Because for twenty-four painful hours, Willa was no longer in control of her own body. She could not say what she wanted, nor could she act as she wanted, always caught in the shadow of her parents' watchful and stern gazes. For an entire agonized day, Willa was clad in a dress that was much too tight, stuck in sky-high heels that were made for sprains, and smothered so drastically in makeup and hairspray that every breath was suffocated; so much so that Willa had actually woken up the next morning following Midsummers, fighting a severe allergic reaction to a foreign foundation that had left her naturally smooth skin blotchy and raw for well over a week afterwards.

But unfortunately to her, Willa knew better than to try and fight Midsummers a second time. In the weeks building up to Midsummers last year, Willa had been an absolute hellion—going as far as to rip her coral pink dress harshly up the seams, seemingly destroying it for good. Or so a stubborn, naive Willa had initially thought. Instead, Maren Deveraux merely had the dress altered to incorporate a thigh slit theme, and had forced her daughter to work it, despite how uncomfortable and ravaged the outfit had made her feel and appear in the fallout of a judging audience. Under the stars of a balmy Hell, not only was the adopted Willa Deveraux called a tainted kook, but now a freshman slut, too.

And now, bracing back against the harshness and cruelty of her neighbors and her parents' supposed 'friends' that she had faced and been forced to bear at only fifteen years old, Willa could only hope that this year's Midsummers would be a bit more kind to her.

Of course, Maren Deveraux had no idea that any of this had even happened to her. In fact, no one did. No one but Willa . . . and, perhaps, the unknown, undecided recipients of her fateful letters. From time to time, Willa Deveraux often wondered what she might do with those hurtful letters—whether to let them be read or be lost to dust. If she ever chose to erase her pain of Midsummers would that erase a part of herself, too?

After a long moment, Willa was abruptly torn from her thoughts as her mother set her wine drink back down, the glass chiming loudly against the marble. "What do you have so far?" Willa wondered innocently.

"Well, aside from your father and I . . ." Maren trailed off as she ran a crimson-painted fingertip down an organized list that had yet to be finished. ". . . Hudson and Wesley will be going together, and Ace is taking Katie—"

"Katie Griffin?"

Maren abruptly looked up, startled. "Yes, why?"

"No reason," Willa hastily reassured, even as her nose wrinkled in smug disgust. "She's a bitch, so I guess it makes sense."

"Don't say that about your brother," Maren scolded with a weary sigh. On any other occasion, at the harsh mouthing of her sibling, Willa would have gotten a more stern shouting from her mother, but not now; not with Midsummers looming over all of the Deverauxs and the unbalanced kook family consumed with enough chaos as it was. "And watch your mouth," She added as an afterthought.

Willa rolled her eyes and bit down a scoff, vaguely aware that her younger brother was involved in a pathetic summer fling with another kook girl from the next neighborhood over. Pearly and perfect, Katie Griffin was a grade older than Willa and Ace, but Willa was sure that Katie had no problem being the older member of a blossoming relationship if it meant getting a taste of the Deveraux riches. Katie was not the first outsider to attempt clawing their way into a Deveraux heart with the strict intention of getting some money out of it, nor would she be the last. Out of all the Deveraux teenagers, bouncing in and out of youthful romances, Hudson and Wesley were the only relationship that prevailed strong. Where Lex was too young to begin experimenting just yet, Willa knew deep in her heart that she was too angry and too unpredictable for love and a stable relationship in the current stage of her own disorderly life. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Elsewhere, Ace was too proud and ignorant to admit that his popularity and love stemmed strictly from his last name, and Cruz—as simple as it was—was just not interested in pursuing any romance.

Speaking of Willa's other young brother, the Deveraux daughter shifted further down the counter and tilted her head in curiosity. "Whose Cruz taking?" She questioned.

Maren puffed out her lips, her narrow cheek bones sharp against the softly wrinkled skin. "That's the million-dollar question, isn't it?" She countered of her daughter. "He hasn't asked anyone and with cell service down, he's not going to go out of his way to reach out to anyone from his class in person . . . which leaves me to figuring it out myself, as usual."

Deep down in her heart, Willa was certain that Cruz had people to ask in mind but knowing that they were all pogues from the south side of the island, asking them would be impossible. Their mother would never allow such a scene; a kook and a pogue walking hand-in-hand, two little souls daring to fight against the stigma that they were destined to stay apart. Willa's face softened the slightest, wondering how horrible of a date that Maren might set up for her youngest son. Willa did not want to see her baby brother hurt like that, forced into a world he did not necessarily belong in. Cruz Deveraux had enough trouble adapting to kook events as it was—he did not need the added pressure of pleasing a date, too. "Does he really need an escort?" Willa wondered dryly. "It's only his first year."

"Of course, he needs an escort," Maren rebuked, matter-of-fact. "We're not animals."

The quiet grumble of Willa's stomach prevented her from snapping back a retort that would have sent her mother shrinking back in her seat, guilty for ever letting such hateful words slip past her strawberry-painted lips. Letting her sage gaze drift away from the kitchen island where Maren sat, unknowing and obstinate, her eyes then settled on two cookie jars of lemon and Oreo delicacies pushed against the far wall, hidden in the shadow of the looming steel refrigerator. Always filled to the brim in perfectly stacked rows, they were most definitely the kind of glass cookie jars that were seemingly and strictly made for show on reality television—but that never stopped Willa or Cruz, or even little Rayne from sneaking a tasty, crumbling cookie or two out and ruining the jar's perfect order. "Well, why don't I just be his escort?" Willa offered as she reached two amethyst and opal ring-cladded fingers into the full jar and scooped two Oreo cookies in her clean palm. Willa paid the lemon cookies no mind at all, for she was not exactly a lemon-flavored girl anymore—not after an entire long-ago night spent in the lonely company of a tray of lemon drop shots. "That knocks out two birds with one stone," She insisted. "because I haven't asked anyone, either."

"Hmm . . . that won't work," Maren denied, rubbing her throbbing temples softly as she looked carefully to her eldest daughter with a gentle, yet heedless smile. "I'm already working on getting you an escort, too. It's just a bit more complicated . . . considering I wanted to give the family a formal invitation. Well . . . at least to his mother and father. I know how you kids are, but . . . It just doesn't feel proper asking any other way." Only Maren Deveraux would stress about the appropriation of invites; that was likely what was keeping her up at night now, tossing back and forth as her husband slept so soundly beside her, like the unbothered man he was. For as long as Willa had been old enough to understand her mother's pickiness, informal invitations had never really been Maren's thing. In fact, it was only mid-July and Maren had already ordered the invitations for their annual Christmas party.

"Mom, no," Willa protested with a stubborn shake of her head. "You set me up with an escort last year and we didn't even talk. Within ten minutes of being there he literally left me to go get drunk with his friends."

"This time will be different. I promise," Maren hurriedly soothed. "This boy's a real gentleman."

Willa bit down on her the tip of her tongue and tried not to let the boiling anger reach her vivid, stormy eyes, knowing there were no true kook gentlemen on the entire island. At least, in Willa's experience there were none. Nonetheless, this year, if her escort were going to be a douchebag, she would ditch him first to get drunk all by herself. Because as always, Willa Deveraux never made the same mistake twice. "He better be," She grumbled in warning. "'Cause I'm not afraid to dump a whole bowl of punch on his head if he's an asshole, too."

"Don't be silly, Willa."

"You think I'm joking?"

Maren rolled her narrowed, forest-green eyes, but they both knew that the Deveraux daughter was more than capable of doing all that she had threatened, and Maren likely did not want to push that rickety boundary just yet; not when they were still speaking so civilly to one another. "Speaking of punch—that reminds me," The older woman recalled. "I need to run to the market to gather up some last-minute things for dinner, and then I need to drop by Cherrie's to pick up those weird matching ties for Hudson and Wesley." Maren then finally closed her planner, her nose scrunched in similar fashion to Willa's own. "And while I'm doing that, I need you to run downtown and pick up your dress from the tailor's before it closes."

Willa frowned. "But Midsummers isn't even for—"

"Thank you."

Willa's teeth gritted together, and her hands curled into fists around the two uneaten Oreos that still rested in her palm. She could feel the blackening crumbs burrowing into the crevices of her sun-kissed skin, and sprinkling down onto the hardwood floor below, each tiny crumble hitting hard and precise, directly in Maren's perfected line of sight, seemingly shattering the tensed silence like its own bomb. With bated breath, Willa turned away, rather than push back. There was a certain enticement in taking the car downtown. Only a few miles further south and she would be back into the Cut, back into the horrific but true reality that would not let her so easily escape through the means of Midsummer daydreams and chocolate-swirled treats.

"Oh, and Willa?"

Now nearly out of the kitchen, Willa Deveraux abruptly froze at her mother's sudden calling. "Yeah, mom?" She asked cautiously, poking her head back around the corner, her sage orbs locked once more on the lonely, marble kitchen island where Maren sat, twirling her wine glass tightly between pinched grips.

"What did Kiara want?" Maren wondered coolly.

Willa's eyes widened in alarm and once more an uncertain dread coated her veins, her blood turning to ice. "What?" She forced out.

Maren blinked in confusion behind her dainty spectacles. "When Kiara dropped by yesterday?" She reiterated slowly and stiffly, as if, perhaps, she had gotten the young girl on the porch's face wrong. "She seemed like she had something really important to talk to you about."

"Oh, yeah. Um. She just wanted to run something by me for our upcoming debate . . ." Willa admitted, lying carefully through her teeth. She finally took a careful bite of an Oreo cookie and slowly placed the other back on the counter, untouched and unwanted. ". . . It's on gun violence," She deadpanned.

"Gun violence?" Maren repeated with a soft gasp. "That's a bit of a heavy topic for you kids, isn't it?"

"You have no idea," Willa brushed off, even as her knees began to secretly tremble and her blood began to rush faster, warming her cheeks and her throat. Oh, how Willa Deveraux wished that gun violence could only be a topic discussion in her life; not a cruel reality. "But, surprisingly, gun violence is a lot more common than you think—especially with kids," She informed, the unmindful sneering words falling dangerously off her pointed tongue, two worlds starting to clash as one. "Well, at least that's what Kiara says. She's done a lot more research than I have, and she thinks that might help us win the argument."

Maren pursed her lips as she nodded her head in understanding. Certainly, she had never been taught since things in her own schooling, but she could only assume that as times changed around them, so did the curriculum. "So," She addressed carefully, her ears still perked on a certain Carrera name, a certain memory lost between two peculiar little girls Maren had witnessed so long ago. "are you girls paired up together, or something?"

"Yeah," Willa clipped sharply. ". . . Is that a problem?"

Maren hesitated briefly, and in that silence, in that paralyzed pause, she carefully set her wine glass down, and ran a cold finger along the reddened rim. "Nope," She ultimately assured. "Just checking in."

Sure, you are, was what Willa Deveraux wanted to spit back in defiance of her cutthroat mother. Instead, she smartly chose to hold her venom at bay and hide her clenched fists behind her back as she quickly turned on her heel once more and exited the family kitchen for good. With swirling irritation striking hard and fast in her hammering chest, Willa marched her way upstairs in pursuit of another Deveraux that would surely get her blood pressure rising before the encounter was over, too.

Unlike her more polite siblings, Willa held little regard to knocking and as she reached the end of the wide, hardwood hallway, she hastily barged into her younger brother's dimmed bedroom without a moment's hesitation. "Jesus Christ!" Ace Deveraux abruptly exclaimed in alarm, whipping around quickly in his thick, leather gamer chair that had been pushed to the far opposite side of the mahogany-colored room, set diagonally from his massive television on the north wall. "Ever heard of knocking?" He snapped.

"Ever heard of cleaning your room?" Willa retorted coldly, brushing right past the bright screen that displayed the likes of zombies and soldiers. "It smells like straight up pot in here." With a quick swipe of her jeweled fingers across Ace's messy dresser, Willa was grabbing the familiar set of car keys, all the while completely oblivious to the partially hidden, tiny dusting of white powder that clung to the deepened grain of the blackened wood. "I need to borrow the car," She explained over her shoulder.

Ace frowned suspiciously. "What for?"

"To pick up my dress," Willa answered curtly, already making her way back towards the open door, determined to get out of Ace's stuffy bedroom as quickly as she had entered it.

Behind her, Ace's frown only deepened, his blue gaze cold and calculated as he put down his game controller. "Where were you last night?" He wondered.

Willa's fingers tightened around the jagged keys latched tightly in her palm. "None of your business," She jabbed. "Where were you after the party at the Boneyard?"

"None of your business," Ace rebuked, his jaw stiff with a venom all of his own making; a venom that all the Deveraux children unknowingly held, crafted and formed from the bitter hate that swirled in each of their beating, stormy hearts, etched and lost in forgotten histories that none of them might never know.

Willa smiled at her brother, a sweetness that did not reach her guarded eyes. Her body was a practical silhouette against the growing light of the hot sun that shone faintly from out in the hallway through the shaded windows, a shadow moving slowly and intricately as it reached for the copper doorknob. "Glad we're on the same page, then," She dismissed crudely.

Suddenly, Ace's eyes flashed darkly. "Hey, wait—"

Willa Deveraux did not wait to hear the rest of what her younger brother had to say and quickly pushed out into the open hallway, letting the heavy white door fall to a close behind her. In the empty corridor, Willa did not pause to contemplate the unknown that waited back on the opposite side of the wall. Surely, there was nothing good that Ace Deveraux ever had to offer her; nothing that did not involve lies and threats to her being. Willa shook her head, ridding away thoughts of confusion, and looked back down the opposite end of the corridor, her eyes widening in surprise as she abruptly realized that hallway had not been as empty as she initially thought.

Little Lex Deveraux stood near the start of the staircase, far enough from sight of Ace's bedroom, but never out of earshot. "What do you want?" Willa questioned dryly.

Lex clasped her hands together over her front and took a small step towards her older sister. "Can I go with you to the tailors?" She pleaded.

"No," Willa instantly answered, growing closer to Lex's waiting form as she swung the keys carelessly around her index finger. The eldest Deveraux daughter had only ever meant to step in and step out of the home and make a small appearance; she certainly had no intention of greeting every member of the family along the way. "You don't even have a dress," She pointed out, never missing a beat.

Lex glowered at Willa, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment; shame that she was missing out on so much. That all her older siblings got to have grandeur summer experiences, and she was left to their shadows, a forgotten voice crackling in despair. "So, what?" She countered.

"So, I said no," Willa retorted coldly, as callously as any older sister would do when she wanted a precious moment of space, unsuspecting of how hurtful her words might become in the long run of all bonds with her younger siblings. Unfortunately, Willa might not come to know this heart-wrenching, building barricade of malice and doubt until it was too late, until she lost another sibling all over again.

And with her curly and knotted, red-streaked head pointed towards the floor, Willa finally made her great escape, leaving Lex Deveraux, saddened and alone, at the top of the grand staircase.

➸➸➸

THE DRIVE OUT OF the Figure Eight was one spent in pleasurable silence.

With all the windows of Willa and Ace's shared white, 2014 Jeep Wrangler Sport rolled down and the sharp, ocean breeze blowing fiercely through her freed locks, Willa Deveraux felt that she could finally breathe. For only a few precious moments, Willa could pretend that she was the adventurous and rebellious summer child that she had set out to be at the start of June. With her hands on the wheel, Willa no longer felt suffocated by the weight of two gunmen looming in the distance, and was no longer fearful that a small, golden compass could be responsible for her entire inevitable undoing.

Of course, even as she tried to convince herself otherwise, Willa could not help but think of those gradual weights that would soon be set back upon her weakened shoulders. Willa wondered what had become of John B. and Kiara—if they had managed to escape the Redfield Lighthouse without getting caught by the cops. She also wondered what JJ and Pope were doing—if they were still together, waiting out the storm of the unknown at the Maybank home. If John B. and Kiara had made it back to the south side of the Cut in one piece, were they all now still waiting for Willa's own return, too? Or had they forgotten about her already?

Secretly, Willa hoped it was the former option. She had not gone through all of this for nothing. She had not bruised and broke to be left behind like she was nothing more than a tainted kook, unwanted by both sides of the same island.

Nonetheless, regardless of who might or might not be waiting for Willa in the marshes of the Cut, she would not let that uncertainty of loyalty distract her now. For in the short time it took Willa to make her way downtown, she was just a teenager, wild and free, with the seas on her front and the wilderness at her back. She had an entire island beneath her fingertips, with highways and streets that she knew like the backs of her hands. Despite only being a licensed driver for three months—(and an unlicensed driver for three years)—The Outer Banks' roads were easy to drive; so impossibly easy that Willa could not help but let her bright gaze drift from the steaming hot road as she drove, trusting her hands to guide her as her mind wandered.

And that—in her dazed state of mistrust to the island she called home—was how Willa Deveraux nearly ran someone over.

Well, not just someone.

Willa immediately slammed down on the brake as harshly as she could the moment she heard a faint shout beyond her opened passenger's window, stopping the expensive Jeep so sharply in its tracks on the road that she frightfully choked against the stiffness of her taut seatbelt. Willa's rings soon dug painfully into her bruised knuckles by how tightly she now gripped the cool steering wheel and her heart raged hazardously in her breathless chest, her lungs struggling to circulate through her body's rattling shock. With her eyes widened to fiery sage saucers, Willa's glinted glare snapped towards the lone male figure that stood inches from the front of the Jeep, his bare and dirty hands now holding tightly to the black rim, as if he thought he could bare the impact of the impending collision all by himself.

And in the scorching silence of two souls locked together by the lost shrill of screeching brakes and burning rubber, a pair of bruised and defeated, hickory warm eyes stared back at Willa Deveraux through the clear windshield.

"John B.?"

~~~~~~~~~~

somehow i went into this chapter with the idea that this would be the shortest chapter i would write for 'letters she wrote', and now its one of the longest ones i've written so far. i am a mess. but i hope y'all are enjoying these long chapters!!

a chapter pretty much entirely dedicated to fragile and scattered pieces of the deveraux clan... and just a bit more into the inner thinkings of our sweet willa... baby girl's not had it easy, and wow, midsummers is not gonna be kind to her in the future.  so, how are we all feeling about willa? i always love hearing your thoughts on my girl! i hope y'all are liking her.

aaaanddd how're we feeling about maren deveraux?? what are y'all thinking of this mother/daughter relationship? do you think it's going to crumble or stand?

anyways, i hope y'all enjoyed this craziness of a chapter! there's more to come very soon!! like, the next chapter is going to be brutal, and 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.