“So where is he going to take you?” Mia asks me as we’re finishing up lunch the next day. After lunch, I’m going to Dr. Lombardi’s office so that she can explain to me how this is even going to work and then she’ll give me the clothes that Sophie apparently bought (I’m going to insist that she let me/ my dad pay her back) and then after that, I get to leave.

I just shrug. “I’m not sure. We only have two hours though so it can’t be too far away.”

“This is so exciting for you,” She tells me with a grin. “You, getting to go out into the world. Wear real-people clothes. You must be so excited.”

“I am,” I tell her, grinning at the thought of getting out of these vomit-inducing baby blue scrubs and getting out of the barriers of this center. “Have you ever gotten to do this kind of thing?”

“Nope,” She sighs. “But it’s not unheard of. Usually, people are here for at least four months before they’re considered for breaks but I guess they just think that you’re special.”

“I guess,” I mumble. “How long have you been here?”

“About seven months now,” Mia says. “But I don’t want to get break and even if I did, they wouldn’t let me. They don’t think that it would benefit my recovery at all and they’re probably right. But you’re obviously not liking the whole ‘locked up abroad’ thing so I think it’ll do you a lot of good.”

“Yeah, I think that it really will. I can’t believe that Niles actually thought of this though, it’s really nice of him,” I say, finishing my grilled cheese sandwich.

“He seems really nice,” She tells me. “Well, have fun. Be safe. Make good choices.”

I chuckle, jokingly roll my eyes at her, and then stand up with my tray of trash so that I can get over to Dr. Lombardi’s office to get this show on the road. “I’ll see you later, Mia.”

As I’m walking away, she says goodbye and then I’m leaving the cafeteria. When I walk into the office, Dr. Lombardi is sitting behind her desk, which I rarely see her do because when I’m in the room, she’s sitting in the comfy chair across from the one that I usually sit in.

“Hello, Ana,” She greets me when she hears me walk in.

“Hi,” I sit down in my regular chair.

“Are you ready for today?” She wonders.

I nod excitedly. “Yeah, I am.”

“Great,” She chirps. “I really think that it will do you a lot of good to be able to get out of here for a little while. Now, obviously, there are going to be some rules just to make sure that you’re safe.”

“Sure,” I nod. “I love rules.”

She offers me a small smile to acknowledge my sarcasm and then starts. “Okay, well first, you have to stay with Niles. You can’t go off by yourself at all. You have to stay within the city limits. You have exactly two hours so you should be back by four. I submitted a prescription for you so I have these pills but they’re just for emergencies. If you have a panic attack, they’ll help you calm down but like I said, only for emergencies.”

“Is that all? No staying away from sharp objects or anything like that?”

“I think that one is implied,” She tells me. “Niles knows about the time limit and all of these rules. Try your best to stay away from any of your strong triggers. You’ll be back before it starts getting dark so that won’t be a problem and Niles knows to keep you out of crowds.”

“How much did you tell him exactly?” I ask her suspiciously. “He knows about all of the things that freak me out?”

“No, he doesn’t. I only told him as much as I had to so that I could ensure your safety. You’re our responsibility here, Ana, and it is my job to make sure that you are getting better at all costs.”

“Sure, I get it,” I sigh.

“Good. Here are some clothes that Sophie has gotten for you, I think she used the size of your scrubs to assume which size to get you so they should fit. Do you have any questions?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks for letting me to this though,” I say, standing up to accept the bag of clothes that Dr. Lombardi hands me over her desk. “This is really awesome of you and Sophie.”

“We just want what’s best for you,” She tells me.

I offer her a small smile before I leave the office to go get dressed in the bathroom. Inside of the bag, there’s a pair of dark skinny jeans- they’re tighter than jeans that I’d usually wear but they fit and they’re comfortable, just not my style- and then there’s a bra that’s way more bra-like than the ones that we wear here because it has an underwire and everything whereas the ones that are part of the uniform are basically just sports bras. There’s a black tank top- thankfully, something that’s black- and a soft sweater with a weird black, tan, and white design on it that passes my hips and buttons all the way up. The sleeves are long too and they cover almost my whole hands and it’s really comfortable but not as black as I’d like it to be. The last part of the outfit that I find in the bag are tan suede boots that kind of match the sweater. Again, they’re cute and comfortable but they’re just not my style and they’re not black.

I put my scrubs in the bag and take it to Dr. Lombardi’s office.

“When you get back, come see me so that I know that you made it back alright and we’ll talk about everything tomorrow, alright?”

I nod, trying to knock the smile off of my face but I can’t do it. I’m so excited for this chance to see the world again. I mean, sure it’s only this town in South Carolina but it sure beats looking at the white walls of this facility all afternoon. “Sure, I’ll see you at four then, Dr. Lombardi.”

“Oh, and don’t forget your pills. You can just keep them in your pocket just in case,” She tells me, handing me the small plastic canister that holds two of those white pills.

I take the canister and slip it into my jeans pocket and silently pray that I won’t actually need to use them at all.

“Niles is waiting for you in the visitor’s center. Have fun and be careful,” She advises me as I nearly run out of the office to go find Niles so that I can get out of here. To be honest, I think that I’m also excited to be spending so much time with Niles since he’s so cool. It’s not just the fact that I am temporarily a free woman but it’s also who I get to be free with.

When I get into the visitor’s room, Niles is the only one in there and when he sees me walk in, he offers me a broad smile.

“Ready to go?”

I nod as I walk toward him and then we leave the visitor’s room through the door that I’ve never been through. It leads out to this waiting room area with a long reception desk and a lot of chairs that line the wall. I’ve been in this room just once, when I first got here and I had to sign in and everything. “So where are we going? I’ve been thinking about the possibilities all night and it’s been killing me.”

“You didn’t want me to tell you though,” He reminds me with a small chuckle as we leave the rehab center and walk through the parking lot to a black car that I assume is Sophie’s since Niles told me that he doesn’t have a car right now.

“Yeah, but I want you to tell me now.”

“Hang on, I kind of want to know what you think the possibilities are first,” He jokes, getting in the driver seat as I open the passenger door to get in as well.

“Well at first, I was thinking maybe you were going to take me to meet your friends but I realized that Dr. Lombardi probably told you that I’m not allowed to meet other people. And then I thought that we’d go to the park or something. I don’t know, the park seems kind of nice but I don’t know what kind of parks are around here. I would love to see a hockey game but I recognize that it isn’t in season right now and it’s a large crowd which is a bad idea. So yeah, I have no idea where we’re going.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” He chuckles as he starts the car and we’re then driving off down the road.

“I haven’t been outside of that property in over six weeks,” I remind him, leaning back against the chair. “I’m excited.”

“I can tell,” He says with a small smile, glancing over at me before he puts his eyes back on the road again. “I hope that I don’t disappoint.”

“I can assure you that you won’t,” I tell him with a small smile as I’m watching out the window, analyzing the buildings and the summery nature around us. The bright trees, the birds and the squirrels, the bright blue sky. I mean, I see the sky a lot through windows and in the courtyard but it’s so different out here, without the barrier of a tall wall blocking out most of the view. This is real. This is the world.

I’m so distracted by the view from the road that I don’t even realize that we’re parked until I hear the click of Niles’ seat belt and I look up to see that we’re parked in a parking lot in front of a large gray building. I’m about to ask him where we are but before I do, I notice that right above the entrance to the building, there’s big letters that spell out “Ice Arena”.

“I should have seen this coming,” I say.

“Yeah, you should have,” Niles chuckles as he gets out of the car and I do the same, following him up to the entrance of the building. As we walk through the doors, I understand why Sophie had gotten me a sweater, because it’s actually cold inside. It feels kind of good compared to the scorching sun outside though. There’s nobody in the building so I assume that it’s closed, which is kind of confusing to me.

“So what are we doing here?” I ask him curiously, hoping that it’s not the obvious answer.

“Skating,” He tells me and when he sees my eyes widen a little bit, he chuckles and then walks behind the counter where there’s shelves and shelves of ice skates. “What?”

“I can’t skate. I like to watch people on ice that doesn’t mean that I can actually skate,” I tell him with a shake of my head. “I’ll just watch you though.”

“You can’t just watch, that’s no fun,” Niles says. “What size are you?”

I let out a long sigh and then lean against the counter, staying on the customer side of it. “Seven. Are you sure that I’m allowed to be that close to sharp things? That isn’t one of the rules of being my babysitter?”

He grabs a pair of white skates and then hands them to me over the counter with a look that tells me that he disproves of my distasteful joke. “I trust that you can handle it, Ana. And I’m not your babysitter.”

“You kind of are,” I tell him, but I also appease him by grabbing the skates from him and waiting for him to walk back around the counter but I notice that he doesn’t grab any skates for himself. “You don’t think that I could possibly go out there on my own, do you?”

“Well, I’m sure that you could if you really tried,” He grins at me. “But I’m going with you, I just have my own skates in the back. Come on.”

I follow him through a hallway of the arena and then into a locker room that smells of rubber and sweat. “It smells really bad in here,” I mutter, wrinkling my nose at the smell. There’s skates, pads, and hockey sticks laying around all over the plate with all four walls of the room covered in lockers and a bench. I sit on part of the bench near the door as Niles goes to one of the lockers and pulls out some skates.

“I’m sorry,” Niles chuckles. “It’s a guys’ locker room though, so I guess it’s bound to happen.”

“Am I even allowed back here then? Isn’t there some kind of ‘no girls allowed’ rule?” I wonder with raised eyebrows as he sits down on the bench and starts switching to the skates, so I start to do the same.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to mind,” He assures me. “You’re fine.”

“Okay then,” I sing. The boots are kind of hard to take off but I manage and then I place them on the bench beside me before slipping the white skates onto my feet. “Why do my skates looks so much smaller than yours?”

“That’s probably because mine are hockey skates and yours are figure skates,” He informs me.

“That’s kind of sexist, don’t you think?”

Niles offers me a small smile along with a laugh and then he says, “Figure skates are easier to skate in for beginners. Even for guys. They have a toe pick at the front in case you want to stop.”

I look down at the blades below my feet and see the jagged teeth-like part at the front of the metal and I realize that’s probably what he’s talking about because I don’t see them on his skates at all. “Oh. Well, then how do you stop?”

“I use the blade. Or I run into a wall,” He tells me with a side smile.

“That sounds very dangerous,” I say, tying the skate on my left foot and then on my right one, making sure that they’re as tight as possible so that they don’t fall off while I’m skating or falling on my butt.

“Yeah, it kind of is. But I haven’t broken anything yet so I guess I’m doing okay,” Niles jokes as he finishes with his skates and then puts his shoes in his locker before sliding his leather jacket off of his shoulders and then his arms and hangs it up in the locker before grabbing a red cotton jacket from the locker and closing it. Before he slips the jacket on, I notice a black design inked into the inside of his right forearm but I’m too far away to see what the tattoo is. I might ask him about it later.

I stand up too so that we can go out to the ice but after taking a few steps, I start to wobble. “I can’t even walk in them. How can you expect me to actually skate in them?”

Niles walks over to me effortlessly, as if he’s just wearing regular shoes instead of walking on less than a centimeter wide piece of sheet metal. “I know it probably feels weird but you’ll get used to it. Just grab my shoulder if you feel like you’re going to fall.”

I nod and then we start walking through the hallway again toward the ice rink. I try to find my balance but the whole way there, I feel like I’m walking on a wobbly tight rope or something but by some miracle, I hobble my way all the way to the edge of the rink. Niles opens a waist high door that just looks like part of the wall and then he steps onto the ice.

“Ready?” He wonders, offering me his hand for help.

I shake my head. “I can’t do this.”

“Well, have you ever tried?”

“No, but I still can’t do it.”

“If you haven’t tried then you can’t possibly know that you can’t do it,” He tells me and what he’s saying sounds kind of reasonable, I guess, but it’s not enough to get me to take that step onto the ice.

“Sure, but I can’t do it,” I repeat stubbornly.

“Here, take my hand. It’ll be okay. What’s the worst thing that can happen?” He wonders, offering me his hand for support.

“I can fall on my butt,” I remind him.

“Exactly. And that’s not so bad,” Niles says with that signature grin that he loves to use on me oh-so much. I wonder if he grins at other girls the way he grins at me. I wonder if it makes other girls melt and do exactly what he says. It doesn’t work that well on me though, because I’m not a sucker for a pretty grin. He can grin at me as beautifully as he wants, that’s not going to take the sting off of my butt when I fall and embarrass myself. “It doesn’t even hurt. Trust me. I probably won’t even let you fall at all.”

“That didn’t sound very reassuring,” I tell him but somehow, that’s enough to convince me to step onto the ice. I lean mostly onto the wall but I take Niles’ offered hand for balance as well. When both of my skates are firmly on the slippery ice, Niles closes the gate behind me and then glides over to me so that he’s standing right in front of me.

“You’ll be fine,” He repeats. “Just lean forward and act like you’re running. And keep your ankles straight.”

“Alright. Got it,” I nod but I don’t leave the wall, I just kind of awkwardly push myself along the wall. “Is this it?”

“I’m not sure that’s really skating,” He teases me as he glides along the ice beside me. Such a show off.

“I’m trying my best,” I defend as I continue to push myself along the wall, trying to keep my ankles from wobbling in hopes of finding some sense of balance on this ice.

“Here, let me help you,” Niles suggests before he reaches over and it looks like he’s about to help me stabilize myself by holding onto my waist but he suddenly stops, his hand hanging in midair for a moment before he takes my hand instead.

“Is one of your babysitter rules that you can’t touch me?” I ask him as he pulls my hand farther away from the wall. I focus on keeping my feet straight and leaning forward and then slowly but surely, Niles replaces the wall and he is suddenly the thing that I am leaning against for support.

“It might be,” He tells me vaguely, which is basically just saying yes.

I run my hand over the pill bottle in my jeans pocket as some sort of reassurance that if my next decision is a mistake, I’ll be okay. I feel so stupid though, needing all of these rules just to go out into the real world, and I don’t want to follow all of them. Especially one as stupid as ‘no touching’. So I pull his hand, the one that’s supporting almost all of my weight, and I place it on my right hip. “It’s okay,” I tell him when I feel him tense up. “I won’t shatter.”

With an unsure sigh, Niles goes with it and grips my waist in his hand before placing his other hand on the left side of my waist, basically holding me up. I feel the expected shiver run up my spine because I don’t like it when people touch me. Especially a boy. Especially one that I don’t know incredibly well. I don’t like it at all. However, I keep telling myself that Niles is a good guy. He’s not going to hurt me. I tell my hands not to start shaking but they don’t listen right away so I pull them close to my sides so that he can’t tell. I take a few deep breaths to calm myself down so that I’m not panicking and then I start pushing off of the ice.

With Niles holding onto me, it’s a lot easier to move on the ice. “See? You just have to push off of the ice, lean forward, and run,” He tells me, his voice is almost right in my ear and it makes me even more nervous but I ignore it. According to Mia’s analysis of Niles, many girls would love to be in my position right now, with his hands on my waist and his voice in my ear. I wish that I could feel that excitement, and maybe I do, it’s just blurred out by all of the nerves that are racked up in my anxiety.

“You make it sound a lot easier than it is,” I croak. “I feel like I’m two seconds away from falling on my face.”

“You’re not going to fall,” He says again with an amused laugh. “It’s alright.”

“Okay…” I take a few deep breaths and I really try to concentrate on not falling and not relying on Niles to hold me up as much and I really try to balance in the skates and push myself forward. “I think I’m getting it.”

“You’re doing good,” He agrees with me. “I’m going to let go now.”

“No don’t let go,” I say quickly, in one breath, as I start to panic that if he lets go, I’m going to fall right on my butt within a second. “Just a little longer.”

“Whatever you say,” Niles chuckles, the breath breezing over my ear. Another shiver snakes its way up my spine and it begins to make me sick to my stomach so I know that he needs to let go soon or I’ll really have to use those pills in my pocket and I really don’t want to have to do that because it’d be the most humiliating thing ever. It doesn’t make any sense to me, how my body can tell me that I’m afraid of Niles when I’m not really afraid of him. At least, I don’t want to be afraid of him.

“Okay,” I say quickly although I’m not so convinced that I can do this. “I can do it.”

“Are you sure?” He wonders from behind me.

I nod, focusing on the skating. Lean forward. Run. Lean forward. Run. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Alright. I’m right here if you need any help,” Niles reminds me as he hesitantly removes his hands from my waist but he remains by my side, making sure that I’m not going to fall. As if to show off, he then moves in front of me and starts skating backward in front of me.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I mutter with a wide grin on my face when I really realize that I’m actually skating by myself and, even if I can’t skate backwards like some people, I’m doing it all by myself. There are very few things in this world that people let me do by myself and even if this one is a small victory, it is a victory nonetheless. “This is so cool!”

He grins at me. “See? I told you that you could do it.”

“Yeah but I didn’t actually believe you. This is so cool. It feels like flying,” I say, and I find that statement to be incredibly ironic because the last time that I felt like I was flying, I was dying of blood loss. But right now, with the wind blowing through my hair and Niles grinning in front of me, I’ve never felt more alive.

~~

“Okay, so what’s your story?” I ask Niles as we’re sitting in some of the bleachers that surround the ice rink with a bag of popcorn each that we made at the concessions stand thing. We had skated for about an hour and for the most part, I just skated in circles, trying my best to keep my balance, and I watched Niles skate around the rink, doing a bunch of cool hockey stuff that I could never dream about doing. I fell a few times and my butt kind of hurts but Niles was right, it really didn’t hurt that bad and it was kind of funny (mostly for him). “Or am I allowed to ask you that?”

“Why wouldn’t you be allowed to ask me that?” He wonders, munching on some of his popcorn.

“Well, I won’t tell you all of my story so I guess that’s it’s not really fair for me to ask about yours,” I explain, putting a few more buttery pieces of popcorn in my mouth and propping my feet up on the seat in front of me.

“Yeah, well my story isn’t nearly as dark as yours,” He shrugs. “I don’t really even have a story. I live with my parents and my sister and I spend most of my time playing hockey or trying to pass math.”

“Really? No hidden, dark secrets?” I wonder curiously.

“Not really,” He says, shaking his head. “I guess the most traumatic experience that I’ve had was when I broke up with my girlfriend.”

“The one who cheated on you?”

Niles nods. “That would be the one.”

“Sore subject?”

He shrugs again. “It was a long time ago. I’m pretty much over it now.”

“Can I take a guess?” I ask rhetorically. “Okay, so you dated this girl and it was probably for a long time, based on what you just said, and she was probably the love of your life. But then she cheats on you and then you pick up the broken pieces of your heart and put it in a box and lock it far away. And then, instead of getting your heart broken, you become the heartbreaker. You start sleeping around with random people, which is very icky by the way, and you tell yourself that it makes you feel better when, deep down, there’s still a sad little hole where she used to be. Am I close?”

I look over at Niles and he’s giving me a weird look and I laugh a little bit.

“What? That’s so cliché,” I tell him, eating some more of my popcorn. “Please tell me that it gets more original than that.”

“It wasn’t like that,” He says, shaking his head at me. “I mean, maybe you were at least a fourth right. We were together for two years and I really did love her. And then I caught her cheating on me but that’s about where you start going wrong. I didn’t become some sort of player to wash away the pain like this so-called cliché story that you just made up.”

“So if you didn’t start an STD scrapbook, how’d you get over it?” I ask him curiously.

“A lot of moping, a little bit of alcohol, and maybe one hook up. After a few weeks I realized that I was being ridiculous and I started moving on,” He tells me.

“And you learned that you don’t do commitment,” I add.

“Right,” He chuckles. “That too.”

“I think that you’re lucky,” I tell him honestly. I’m not sure how I’m able to be so honest with him right now but like I’ve always said, it’s just so easy to talk to him for some reason. I have no idea why, but I just feel like I can talk to him. “That you ever even got to give your heart away to somebody. Sure, she broke it like a twig but at least you had those two years of knowing what it felt like. Not me. Mine got shattered before I even got the chance to put it out there.”

“Are you going to elaborate on that?”

“No,” I shake my head, glancing over at him before my eyes go back to the ice in front of us. “Dr. Lombardi keeps trying to get me to talk about it but she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t know what it would do to me.”

“What what would do to you?”

“Remembering,” I sigh. “I mean, I remember it. It’s always playing in the back of my mind- I can’t really escape it. But talking about it, putting it into the air makes it palpable. Real. I don’t know, it’s like a nightmare that I can tell myself isn’t real. Sometimes, I can convince myself that it’s just a nightmare and that’s all. But when I start talking about it, it becomes real again. And I can’t take that kind of thing.”

“I get it,” He tells me. “I mean, I don’t get it but I kind of get it. If that makes any sense.”

“Sure,” I chuckle. “Anyway, can I ask you a totally unrelated question?”

“I’m an open book,” Niles says, mimicking me. “What is it?”

“Why’d you start talking to me? That day when I was outside, why’d you go out there to talk to me?” I ask him randomly.

He cocks his head to the side, obviously surprised and confused by my randomness. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I was just wondering because Johnny said that the only reason that he approached me in the hallway was because he thought that I was pretty. I mean, after that, we became friends and that’s nice but it’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? To choose your friends based on their level of attractiveness.”

“So are you asking me if I think that you’re pretty?” He wonders.

I shrug. “I don’t know, I guess I kind of am. But not in a fishing-for-compliments type of way.”

“Honestly? Complimenting appearance is against one of the babysitting rules,” Niles tells me and I roll my eyes at him because he used that term and I know that he disagrees with because he doesn’t think that he’s babysitting me. “But what the hell, right?”

“That’s the spirit,” I grin. “I promise that I won’t shatter.”

“Okay, well I honestly think that you’re gorgeous. But that’s not why I started talking to you that day. I thought that you looked lonely and you looked like you were thinking about something really amazing. And I wanted to know what it was that you were thinking about.”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything particularly amazing,” I assure him. “I felt like I was going mad. I still feel like that just… not so much anymore.”

“So what did you think of me?” He asks me.

I shrug. “I don’t know. I didn’t like you very much. Nothing personal, I just prefer to be alone most of the time.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Niles chuckles. “Lucky for you, I’m a stubborn person.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” I mimic him with a teasing eye roll. “What do you think of me now?”

“I don’t think anything’s changed. I still think that you’re gorgeous. I still think that there’s something amazing inside of you and I still want to know what’s inside of your head.”

“I guarantee you that the last part of that isn’t true,” I mumble. “You’d run for the hills.”

“I guarantee you that I won’t,” He refutes. “Anyway, what do you think of me now?”

I look over at him and I look into his deep blue eyes and I try to think of the most honest way to reply to him. “Well first off, I still think that you’re dangerous. But in all honesty, Niles, I hate most people but I don’t hate you and to me, that’s pretty special.”

_______________________

Song: Innocence by Avril Lavigne 
Picture: Ana's outfit

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

Title: Alone
Author: Edenzcute
Genre: Teen Fiction/Mystery/Romance
Summary: You may ask me what two 13 year old girls are doing walking around at night. Or maybe why two kidnappers are stalking the streets for them. But the real question is one of sheer intelligence, what do you do in the face of fear? Fight? Cry?

You run of course.

And that's just what Faith and Leah did.