Author's Note: Not my usual format at all, a little bit rough around the edges due to not having a Beta and writing this in one go on my 750words. However, I felt that the roughness worked for the piece, and decided that I would post it up here. Read, enjoy and review if you can! Comments on writing style/improvements are always appreciated.
You look at her and you wonder, staring hard at her body, taking in the fine lines that you have never seen before, just how you could have missed the change. Now, staring at the firm lines of muscle underneath the blonde haired girl's flesh, you can see the damage. The brokenness of her soul hidden behind the firmness of her body. The darkness in her eyes hidden by the lightness of her smile. You can see the truth shining through the false. Hidden away from eyes that never looked beneath the surface, and you wonder, just when she became able to lie to you, because you've missed this change for years.
Looking back into your memories, digging the information out of the darkness, bringing it to the light you can see the time that she began to change. The Cheerleading Camps that formed her into the woman that you see now in front of you, the one that is not the beautiful blonde haired girl that you met in the middle of a playground and laughed with. You can see that she's being moulded into something different. Something that you never would have expected that she could become. Something that she shouldn't have been able to become.
You look into her hazel eyes, green and gold mixed into a hazy sphere of emotion that you once were able to decode without a challenge. Now you look into those eyes and wonder when the wall was erected to keep you out. You wonder what the moment was, the minute, when she locked you out and you pray that you can break through again, because you can see it. The faults at the corners of her eyes, the heartbreak threatening at every moment to break, and it hurts your heart to see it.
Not many would expect you of all people to care for the state of her heart, but you do, you care. You care more now that you were ever willing to admit before, because your heart aches at the sight of her body, her broken shell of a body that used to house such a beautiful soul but now you aren't sure that soul is there any more. You hope, you hope that it is merely hiding, battered and broken, but able to be fixed. At night, you sit at the end of your bed, staring at a picture of the girl on your bedside table and you pray to a god that you didn't think you believed in any more to make sure that she makes it through the night.
You offer your bed to her, endlessly, praying that one day she'll take you up on the offer. That she will smile at you and tell you that she'll see you at your car after school. She doesn't.
You see her climb into her little Mini, hunch her shoulders as she places her bag in the back seats and sit for a moment purely breathing. Endlessly breathing. You stare at that little car, watching as she puts it into gear before sliding out of the car park, the world flowing around her, but she doesn't not flow with the world. You sit, and you stare, and then you begin to pray. You pray and you hope, and then the next morning you look for that car in the crowded parking lot and fell as if you can't breathe until you see that car, parked in the corner, silent and still and you know, you know, that she made it to school for another day. That she's still alive for another day, and the cycle repeats itself. Endlessly.
Until it doesn't.
One day, the cycle ends.
You don't see her car sat in the parking lot in the morning. You don't see her blonde hair flowing through the hallways as she makes her way around the school for class. You don't see her at first period, and then you know. You know that the pounding in your chest is your heart racing a mile a minute and you know that you are going to have to force yourself to breath in a minute before you black out.
Your phone rings, your eyes look down at the screen, an unfamiliar number. Your thumb shakes as you take the phone and answer the call.
"Miss Lopez?" The voice on the other side of the phone says quietly and you swallow hard before you are able to reply. "I'm calling from Lima Memorial, a Miss Lucy Fabray has been brought in to us, and you are listed as her emergency contact. If it is possible, would you be able to make it to the hospital as soon as possible please?"
The lump in your throat grows but you say yes and click off the call.
Your world crashes. Darkness.
