October 1999
Emily Arceneaux checked her bedroom door.
Still locked. Good. They’d think she’d gone to bed.
Emily waited. She just wanted to be normal.
She wanted to be like the other girls in town.
She wanted to have fun. She couldn’t remember the last time she laughed.
Well, that’s not true. He had made her laugh.
And now he wanted her to leave with him.
That made her smile. And Emily didn’t smile a lot.
A sound came from her window. A pebble hitting the glass. Emily raced to it and opened it. He would be out there, waiting for her.
She grabbed a small bag from under her bed, next to the pile of meds she’d been secretly stashing.
For once, she felt like she could think clearly.
It’d been his idea to stop the meds. He’d been right.
He’d also been right about something else.
She had to get out of this house. Away from her mother.
She raced back to the window. The drop down wasn’t awful. She’d done it before, plenty of times, but this time she knew she wasn’t coming back. Her brothers wouldn’t find her this time. No one would.
She dropped the bag, and it landed on the ground with a quiet thud. Then she slipped out into the night, grabbing her bag and racing for the woods. Racing to her sweet Raymond. The boy who promised to save her.