Gossip was whispered behind hands covering mouths. Giggles following me everywhere I went. Rumors and lies spreading like wildfire.

Almost one entire week of keeping my head down, and still nothing had died down.

Eli was my refuge, and with him cutting back on his ridiculous hours in the gym we actually had time to eat lunch together over the course of the week, and for the first time in my college life, I didn't return 'home' to my father on the weekend. Instead, I stayed firmly wrapped in Eli's embrace at the hotel room that my grandmother had rented out for the whole week so that I could remain close to her, and while it was harder making it to classes on time than if I lived on campus without a car (ride-share had become my life saver), getting to know my grandmother had been worth the hike to school and work.

I ended up spending all day Sunday with her and skipping classes and practice on Monday to spend more time with her, but it all came to an end Monday night when I had to show up for my first shift back since the whole blow up with my father.

Eyes tracked me as I strode across campus, eyes that never would've given me a second glance just a week prior.

It was finally Friday, however, and the results of the first audition for the showcase were about to be posted in the auditorium. To say that the gawking student populace were the least of my worries was an understatement.

The palm fronds swayed in a gentle breeze that ushered in the dry heated breeze that did nothing to cool the raging fire that was threatening to burn me up if I didn't calm down.

Everything was riding on what was written on that piece of paper taped on a door. My future in music, my future with this school, even my future with Eli, because if I didn't win that money, there was no way I could stay in Miami if he chose to finish out his college career there.

My sandaled feet edged closer to the crowd gathered around jumping up and down and hugging each other, another smaller crowd in the distance consoling those who must not have made it.

A few steps closer and I noticed Hazel's coppery red hair flouncing in the air, strands of it splaying across Leo's face as he held her while she jumped up and down that told me that she'd made the cut.

I couldn't spot Bea until I grew closer to the paper, gently pushing through the thick crowd until finally her caramel skin and dark braided head was the only one directly in front of the list.

"Well? Did you make it?"

"Yeah, and Hazel."

My ears perked at her dejected tone.

And then I searched the list for my name. There was Hazel's, then Bea's, then a few of our classmates in drama, even Leo's. But not mine.

I double checked the list. Triple checked it, then frantically scoured down it with my finger making sure I wasn't just missing it somehow. I hadn't missed it. It just wasn't there.

"I'm sorry, but you didn't even want to do it until me and Hazel did, and it's not like you needed the money anyway since you're rich and your dad is so popular and-"

"Bea. What are you saying?"

We were pushed out of the throng of students and gawkers, and Hazel and Leo found their way to us, on the outskirts of our conversation but still listening intently, hands intertwined.

"I just...ugh!" She threw her hands up in the air, face upturned towards the sunny cloudless sky.

"You can have whatever you want, it's not like you needed the prize money like me or Hazel, or even Leo. We don't have a backup plan. You can just ask your dad for more money, right?"

"I...I don't even have anything to say to that. Have you not been on the internet the past few days? You should know that I can't go to my 'daddy' and that music is my only plan, it always has been."

Her eyes grew wide, and then realization dawned on her features as I continued to stare her down.

"I'm so sorry."

"Why are you sorry? It's not like you picked the finalists."

But something from the guilty look on her face told me that there was something she was keeping from me, something that made shame swell in her stomach and unease slither across my spine.

"What did you do, Bea?"

"It wasn't just her...it was me. Leo, too. We emailed the higher ups, the person who supplied the money for the contest and we...we said it wasn't fair for you to be int he contest since you already had more than enough means to make it and that the spirit of the contest would be ruined if you were allowed to enter, because we knew you'd win. You're better than all of us, V. We said it was like letting an already established celebrity onto American Idol or something like that. I guess...I guess they agreed with us."

But what they didn't take into account was that it was my father's money, not mine. That my father was no longer my 'dad', and he would never be again. Despite a scandal and some small acclaim attached to my name because of that man, I was just as broke as the rest of them.

But, they didn't have to know that. The truth of the matter was that they'd backstabbed me, and I definitely hadn't seen it coming.

"Wow. Guess you really were just looking out for yourselves, huh? That's fine, I can make it 'on my own' like you said. I don't need this, and I don't need the band, either. I'll ask our dorm advisor, see if there's any open beds. We weren't ever really roommates to begin with. I wish you all the best in the contest."

I was turned halfway around, almost home free to let the tears fall freely, when Hazel caught me by the elbow.

"Wait, V. Please."

Slowly, cautiously, I turned, waiting for another snake to jump out and puncture my jugular in a similar fashion as to what my 'bandmates' and 'friends' had just done to me.

"What?"

"Um...I'm really sorry. is what happened with your dad true? Like, what happened with your mom?"

Rage colored my insides a deep fire red that couldn't be quelled by anything.

"What makes you think that's any of your business after what you just did to me? After you made assumptions about my situation and my home life, about how much money you thought I had? What gives you the goddamn right to ask me anything having to do with my mother? Nothing. Not after you did that to me you backstabbing bitch."

Hazel pulled her hand off my elbow like it was on fire, but Leo was quick to come to her aid.

"Hey! You would've done the same thing. It wasn't fair, and we just wanted the competition to give all of us a good shot of actually winning. With you in there, it wouldn't have been right."

"What, because you all think I'm better than you? That sounds like a 'you' problem, Leo. If you all weren't so damn insecure about the talent you actually all have, then we all could've competed together in peace and continued with our band, but not anymore, not after this. If you'll excuse me, I have work to get to."

"Oh, yeah, go to your new bitchy ass friends and your fancy captain of the basketball team boyfriend! Like you think you're better than us," Bea spouted off and I almost whipped around and said something that I would regret. Almost.

Instead I kept my head high and continued walking, but it was like a domino effect was happening to me, like everything just taking on the shape of a tsunami wave and up it rose, higher and higher, until it was as tall as a skyscraper in New York City, ready to bear its force down upon me and drown me in its waters.

My mother's face flashed in my mind, but for the first time, I couldn't recall anything she'd ever said to me. I couldn't remember what her voice sounded like, her laugh, I couldn't remember the best things about her because all I could see was my father in the background, wrecking it all with a bottle of liquor in his hand, ready to throw it at the wall and watch the amber liquid slide down it, the remnants coagulating at the bottom like the blood that dripped off my mother's face in that car after she was crushed, severed like she was anything but human.

Walking became a chore, until each heavy laden step turned my legs into a gel that I couldn't wade through, until it suffocated my waist and up my rib cage, clutching my heart in a cruel grip as it twisted and detached the stupid beating thing from my chest.

Breathing was the next obstacle, as the spots began swimming in my vision. Panting, suffocating, that substance crawled up my throat and I began choking on it, coughing and straining as it clutched a wicked hand around my neck and squeezed, cutting off any air I thought I could inhale.

My lungs seized, and then it was a never ending marathon of those images flashing in my mind, impossible to scrub from behind my eyes as my mother's bloodied, battered and torn apart body swam in front of me, like she was there and I could reach out to touch her, but I was on the ground, sobbing and clutching myself instead.

Something warm and wet trickled down my hands, a sharp pain piercing them but it was the outline of my father's body in the distance, tall, intimidating and with nothing to lose, that had me standing up and trying to run the other way, away from him and what he was going to do to me now that I'd outed him and his secret, but closer he came, striding towards me like he was going to finish me off, just like he'd done to her.

To my mother, sunshine and happiness, bright and full of the light that he'd so viciously and effectively yanked away from me and had buried with her instead, leaving me a hollowed out and broken shell of who I was supposed to be, who I could've been had she only lived.

Live. I wish she would've just lived. I wish she could've just held on somehow, for me. To get me away from him, to make sure that I was safe. But her cold and detached, lifeless eyes told a different story.

Because she didn't live, and I was left, a twelve year old girl with a massacred mother and bloodthirsty, liquored up paralyzed father.

Someone was calling my name, but I took off, not bothering to stick around to see who it was. I needed to get somewhere safe, but I had no idea where to go. Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was a deep seated truth buried inside of me that he was the only one who could make me feel okay, but I found myself knocking on a dorm room door that wasn't my own.

And when he finally opened up, shirt around his arms going over his head like he'd been in the process of putting it on before I'd ever even knocked, our eyes locked and he knew that I needed him, needed him in a different way than I'd needed him before and I poured myself into his body, but he wasn't alone in the room.

Patrick stood in the corner, seething, while Maddie shuffled her feet next to Eli's bed, guilty stare pointed directly towards Eli. What the hell had I just walked in on?

My half out of it state of mind swam once more, and my first thought was to ask if he'd been cheating on me with her, but no, he'd never do that to me.

Would he?

I never thought my father capable of murdering my mother, isolating me from the rest of my family, and gaslighting me my entire life, or my friends turning their backs on me and betraying me, either, so anything was possible.

My hands ached and my lungs hurt, and suddenly everything caught up with me.

"Um, is she okay?"

Patrick's words fell on deaf ears as Eli scooped me up in his arms and laid me down on his rumpled bed, a detail I somehow took note of even as he lifted my hands and inspected them. They were bleeding from my palms.

"What the hell happened to you?"

"I-"

"V! V, are you okay?!"

There were multiple sharp rasps on the door, and Patrick angrily strode to it and opened it, revealing the backstabbers who'd started the breakdown in the first place. I was finally coming back around enough to where I realized that I did, in fact, have a mental breakdown in the middle of campus, with who knows how many people watching me and/or taking pictures or videos like I was drugged out running around out of my mind.

I sat up and groaned, clutching my head as searing pain shot down my arms and a closer inspection showed indentions around the cuts on my hands, my fingernails having dug into the skin to pierce the skin.

"What the hell happened to you?! I mean, come on, that was a little dramatic! It's what anyone would've done!"

"Get. Out."

The girls at the door didn't seem to take my seethed words to heart as they kept rambling about fairness and equality and other absolutely trivial bullshit, so I stood on shaky legs and leveled them with a stare they would understand.

"I have more than enough shit to deal with today than your weak excuses. Now, get the fuck out."

Eli came up behind me and without having to hear my explanation as to why I was angry at the two girls on the other side of the door, slammed it directly in their faces. That brought a small smile to my face. At least he was on my side....I hoped.

"Eli...why don't we come back later and we can discuss everything then?"

Maddie sidled up to Eli and rubbed a hand on his arm that he quickly shrugged off, but I was more than on one in that moment, and the red I had begun to see earlier reared its ugly head.

"How about you come back never, and keep your fucking hands off him in the meantime? Sounds like a good enough plan to me."

"Hey, she didn't do anything to you. You can calm down," Patrick said, defending his whatever she was to him, but I didn't care.

"Oh, she didn't do anything to me, huh? Then why are the two of you in here to begin with?"

Crickets.

"Mhm. It's not because she's trying to get with Eli, your so-called best friend, and you have an issue with it?"

"I walked in on him shirtless and her sitting on his bed! What the fuck kind of problem do you think we have?"

I rounded on Eli.

"Eli? Is that true?"

The words were acid on my tongue, but Maddie's satisfied smirk was like fire to my flames in the pit of my stomach, and suddenly I couldn't breathe again. I wasn't mentally stable enough for this shit.

I needed a stable boyfriend, someone who'd love me and wouldn't give me reasons to doubt him, like letting a girl who obviously had a crush on him into his room while he was shirtless and let her sit on his bed.

"Maddie was my friend before everything, and she came to my door and said she wanted to explain everything. I was in the middle of changing into my workout clothes when she did, so I went to the bathroom to finish changing when Patrick knocked. Then we talked for like two seconds when you knocked. I think we're all caught up now."

"You forgot the part about how Maddie was in your bed under your blanket when I came inside."

My nostrils flared as I tried to reconcile what the fuck was my life...and I couldn't. Every single thing that had happened added more and more to that wave and it was suffocating.

Everyone had betrayed me, everyone. Not a single person had held back in their onslaught of betrayal, save for maybe my boss, Chuck.

Green eyes met mine, and there was an insufferable look in them, like he knew I couldn't possibly believe what had happened was the truth, but he didn't deny her being underneath her blankets, and sure, maybe she might've done that out of chance that someone might find them like that in a compromising position, but the fact was that someone did find them.

Two someone's, to be exact.

And I had no idea what to think about that. Did I go with my gut and storm away from him and every wonderful moment we shared, or did I go against what my brain was telling me to do, to trust him after every terrible thing that had happened to me because I had trusted someone?

I didn't want to get hurt again.

I didn't want to give him another piece of my heart, just to give him a chance to rip it out of my chest and shred it into one of the millions of tattered pieces that it was already in.

I didn't know if I'd survive it if I did.

So instead of trusting him, instead of giving him what I so desperately craved and falling into his arms, resting my head on his chest and allowing the warmth beat the coldness and pain out of me, I closed my eyes.

I counted to three.

And when I opened them and he was staring down at me with concern and what I thought was love but knew had to be a different emotion, because how could he love someone as broken and ruined as me, I turned on my heel, wincing as I gripped the doorknob, and walked away from Eli Shepherd, dying on the inside as he followed me out and screamed my name hoping that I'd turn back around, give him another chance.

I didn't turn around.