A/N: This story started through the question of: what if Peyton never wanted Lucas to release his first novel? Everything up until the end of season 4 is the same, apart from LP scenes about Lucas' novel, which I'll elaborate on in a flashback in a few chapters' time.
Just a warning from the outset, I'm not very confident with writing LP cuteness and fluff (working on it though!), and this story is quite angsty and emotional. While it's definitely a LP story, they probably won't be brought together for at least five or six chapters, and even then there's a lot of issues to work through. So if you can't wait until then for a LP reunion, this might not be the story for you!
As for my other story, I'm so sorry about the lack of updates, I'm just feeling a bit at a crossroads with that one. I'm not sure where to take the story and needed a break. Hopefully some inspiration will hit me soon.
Title of this story is taken from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, and the title of this chapter is a song by Josh Pyke. Hope you enjoy reading it, and I'd love to hear what you think.
-
LOS ANGELES, CA – Peyton Sawyer, the Southern girl who singlehandedly captured all of America's hearts in Lucas Scott's surprise bestseller autobiography, An Unkindness of Ravens, has finally been located and identified.
After its release in June and immediate blitz to the top of every bestseller list in the country, Scott's book – full of tawdry storylines and astounding twists, but independently verified as shockingly all true – left readers with one burning question: Where is the real Peyton Sawyer?
Sawyer, 20, who in Scott's book charmed the protagonist with her enigmatic-yet-lovable attitude and remarkable ability to overcome even the most devastating tragedies with grace, has eluded the public eye for weeks despite frenzied media speculation over her whereabouts.
While Scott, also 20, and his fellow characters and real-life friends, including New York fashion designer Brooke Davis, current All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland, Nathan Scott, and his wife, singer-songwriter Haley James Scott, have been only too happy to reveal their association with the book, Sawyer has long shunned the spotlight.
Insiders working on the book have similarly remained tight-lipped on Sawyer's precise location.
"I know where she is, and she's happy and living her life quietly, so I just wish you, [the press], would all leave her alone," Lucas said of Sawyer at a media conference only last week.
"She never wanted to be a part of this, and I strongly ask once again that you respect her privacy."
When asked about Sawyer's whereabouts, Brooke Davis also refused to speculate.
"As the book makes clear, Peyton is an incredible, wonderful person, but she's also intensely private, and I would never betray my friend. She's happy, I hear she's really busy at work, and she just wants to be left alone. Unfortunately so far she hasn't been given the privacy she deserves. Just let her live her life in peace," she said on The Ellen Degeneres Show on Monday.
"I don't think any of us were expecting this huge amount of public interest in our lives, and it's definitely taken a little getting used to."
Penned as star-crossed lovers in Scott's epic tale of romance, Scott ended his novel on an optimistic note, with he and Sawyer in love and happily starting their lives together after graduating high school. He gave no other indication in the epilogue as to whether their relationship had lasted beyond the book's publication. However, with Sawyer suspiciously absent from Scott's side during press conferences and book signings, and Scott pointblank refusing to publicly comment on their relationship, the release of the novel has been plagued with overwhelming public speculation and gossip as to whether the relationship survived its grueling translation into novel form.
Sorry, fans, but today this newspaper can exclusively reveal the answer to be a resounding 'No'.
Sawyer, our sources can reveal, is not living in domestic bliss in their hometown of Tree Hill, North Carolina, as the ending ofRavens might have you believe.
In reality, she is working as an intern at high-end record label, Sire Records, and living across the country from Lucas, in none other than Los Angeles itself.
After a confidential tip-off, reporters waiting outside Sire yesterday sighted a woman matching Sawyer's description exiting the building at 9.36pm.
She immediately shielded her face from photographers, jumped into her car and drove away.
Subsequent comparisons to old photos and a number-plate match confirm the woman's identity as Sawyer.
An inside source at Sire tells us Sawyer's exact job description is a junior intern in the publishing and distribution department, and she has been working there for almost two years.
This strongly supports Scott's portrayal of Sawyer as an enthusiastic promoter of music.
Meanwhile, Scott, who still lives in North Carolina, has deferred his junior year at UNC to depart on a nationwide book tour in September. His novel remains on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for the fifth week running, and is rumoured to be the next to make it onto Oprah's Book Club List.
Fans – generally of the screaming, teenage and female variety – have taken to lining the streets outside already packed book signings in North Carolina, desperate for a glimpse of the novel's movie-star handsome author or one of his similarly good-looking co-characters.
And with her brooding disposition, golden locks and intense personality, the character of Peyton Sawyer is an undeniable – albeit reluctant – fan favourite.
"Of course, we are thrilled with the novel's success," Lindsey Strauss, Junior Editor at publisher Putnam & Pratt said yesterday, when asked about the novel's overnight blockbuster status.
"It is very rare to find a young writer with such honest soul and wit, along with a universal story to tell. We remain inspired by Lucas Scott and every one of his friends and family who have made the novel what it is today."
As for the aloof Peyton Sawyer, this website has made it our mission to strive to keep readers updated as to when, if ever, she finally steps into the spotlight.
Scott's upcoming book tour itinerary has him scheduled for a signing in L.A. in late September, and you can bet this reporter will be on the lookout for any sign of a Sawyer-Scott reunion. And wouldn't that be a happy ending?
But don't hold your breath, folks. Sorry, kids, but fame is a cruel mistress, especially for love-struck teenagers. We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but perhaps it's better to stick with the fairytale. Some love stories are just too good to be true.
-
A single, true fact that had taken Peyton Sawyer two years and a bestselling novel to come to terms with: Los Angeles, California, is full of incredibly beautiful people.
Crammed to the brim, even, with the genetically blessed and artificially enhanced: with the fashionable or the edgy; with the classic or the audacious.
And the absurd amount of beauty that this city could hold wasn't exactly inspiring on a girl's self-confidence.
Peyton could walk down Sunset Boulevard and see young actresses bumping shoulders. She could go into any club on a Saturday night and watch reality TV stars gyrate to the beat. It was all too natural to be caught up in the hype; so easy to be intimidated by this sheer quantity of splendour.
And for most pretty girls Peyton knew, having to compete with this constant saturation of attractiveness was undoubtedly crushingly devastating. Take Brooke, for instance. Brooke and Peyton had spent the whole summer after Senior Year in Los Angeles together, visiting the beach at Malibu, flirting with shirtless college guys playing volleyball and generally enjoying being young and pretty in an unfamiliar city.
But after three tiring months, Brooke had gotten precisely nowhere by batting her eyelashes or (her own personal secret) altering her bikini surreptitiously so it turned more and more skimpy by the day.
When finally her swimsuit was nothing more than two ruined strips of spandex, Brooke was forced to admit that being the most attractive girl at Tree Hill High School (in her opinion, anyway) meant absolutely nothing in California, where the girls were sun-kissed, slender, and looked, well, exactly like her. Rather than one pretty girl in a thousand, as she was accustomed to, Brooke Davis was now one of thousands of pretty girls, and that didn't quite work for her.
So under the guise of starting her label from the largest base possible, Brooke up and moved from the beating sun of Los Angeles back to the more edgier look on the East Cost, to New York City, and Peyton, feeling bemused, slightly lost, and younger than she had ever felt before, was left alone in sunny California for the first time.
Despite a group of admittedly improbably good-looking high-school friends, Peyton at first also found it incredibly difficult to deal with the levels of superficiality she saw on the West Coast.
In Tree Hill, the largest amount of glamour she had seen were the mountains of hairspray and Brooke's caked-on makeup while cheering at basketball games every Friday.
But here – here it was hard enough to order a coffee without practically resting your cleavage on the counter and beckoning to the adolescent waiter with bedroom eyes. Here, Peyton had taken to wearing 5-inch heels every time she went to a bar not because she liked the way she looked in them – she couldn't care less – but simply so she could see something other than people's shoulders all night. Here, she knew the easiest way to get let into the label's morning meeting, short of outright begging, was to simply drop a button on her blouse. Just one, and admission granted. Simple – and as degrading – as that.
And so she played the game to begin with. Her first year in L.A., when she was still the Southern Girl from the small town, Peyton tried her very hardest to fit in. And there were some things she soon realised.
She soon found out that being called 'beautiful', as she often was, was not a compliment; but merely an acknowledgment that she was normal; that she fit the mould of everyone else. She knew, which Brooke did not, that being one of the better-looking girls at her old high school in Tree Hill, North Carolina was laughably meaningless in Los Angeles, California.
She knew the best place in North Hollywood to get a cup of coffee and the only place that knew how to make a decent tea. She knew how to talk on a mobile phone and dodge traffic simultaneously; how to judge the correct amount of cleavage to show in different situations. She knew the game, and just how to play it.
She knew that nobody in L.A. really looked at you, however stunningly beautiful you might be. Sure, people looked in your general direction, but never at you, always at something more interesting; someone more popular, just frustratingly beyond your eyeline.
Her first year in L.A., Peyton found that while she loved the quirks and nuances of the city, she hated those plunging downfalls: the superficiality, the commercialism, the oversaturation, the fact that nobody really saw you for who you really were.
She spoke to Brooke on the phone occasionally, and she tried her best to console her, injecting her warm, liquid words of confidence, of hope. But she wasn't here. Nobody was. In fact, Brooke was three thousand miles away, and so her words changed nothing, and Peyton continued to feel more and more invisible.
At one point, it almost had her up and packing. She would go, she thought, back home, back to where she was appreciated. Back to where she was valued, and special, and unique. Maybe she would pull a Brooke, and head to New York City. Peyton was on the verge of quitting her job and giving up her apartment when it happened.
Lucas' novel, An Unkindness of Ravens, was released, that public love letter to her, that ballad of devotion and yearning. And everything – simply everything, all of Peyton's whole world as she had known it – was turned upside down in the single moment it took for a book to be signed, or paid for, or taken off the shelf and flicked through mindlessly; in the brief second it took for a heart, a life and a relationship to be betrayed, all three at once.
"Peyton!"
She had taken only two steps out of the vestibule at Sire Records when the cameras began to snap. Their sound was deafening, their shutters a million little insects clicking their pincers together menacingly. Click-click-click. Peyton, Peyton, Peyton. We've come to get you, Peyton.
"Peyton, Peyton Sawyer!"
She shuddered. She was surrounded by insects, too. That's what it felt like. Like she was trying to walk forward, but insects were swarming over her feet, jumping on her face, clinging to her neck. She batted at them distractedly.
"Hey, you! Peyton! Look over here, pretty girl! C'mon!"
She tried to keep her head down, to elude the camera's flashes, but the photographers were quicker. The instant she turned her head, a camera would zoom out of nowhere and click, capturing her face, twisting it into an expression marred by confusion and frustration.
"Hey, baby, let me get a picture of you, doll. Show us your pretty face."
Let me get to my car, she wanted to scream. Just let me go. But she had promised herself she would keep her mouth closed. She was not going to justify their intrusion with retaliation. She refused to co-operate with their world. She was going to give them nothing to write about.
"Peyton, when's the last time you saw Lucas? When did you last speak to him?"
Lucas, she thought. She scoffed inwardly. There were a few video cameras around, too, and the footage of her struggling through a mass of paparazzi was sure to make it online within the hour, and then Lucas would see it and realise once more what she was going through. For some reason, the thought of Lucas seeing her in misery gave her some kind of cruel satisfaction. You caused this, Lucas, she thought bitterly. It's your fault I'm famous. And now you are responsible for my public humiliation, my worldwide exposure.
"Do you miss him, huh, Peyton? Peyton? Do ya?"
And he knew how much she despised cameras, after Derek – Ian. How even a single click could send her over the edge. He would immediately understand how much pain she must be in amidst a sea of constant flashes. Good, she thought viciously. Let him see me in pain. Let him feel some remorse for what he has done. Because she knew the one thing which would most hurt Lucas Scott would be to see her suffer.
"Do you still love him, Peyton? Do you?"
And as hard as she tried to ignore them, as much as she willed herself to keep her head down and her mouth shut, as painful as it was to bite down on her lip and curl her fists to keep her wrists from shaking out of control, after that question, that single, innocent enquiry, all that she saw was black.
"AAARGH!"
The object of the pack of photographers' attention finally whirled around to face them fully, her shoulders thrown back, timid no longer, and the hand formerly shielding Peyton Sawyer's face from the camera flashes flew up at them in an unmistakeably rude finger gesture.
"You can all go fuck yourselves. That's my comment to you. Go print that in your fucking useless paper."
And in the time it took for the photographers to recover and begin buzzing around her once more, speaking louder, even more excited than before, their cameras blinding, victorious in finally getting a full face photograph, Peyton Sawyer managed somehow to squeeze into her car and screech, fuming, her resolve finally broken, down the Los Angeles street.
And although the response she gave to the reporters was loud, and outspoken, and spontaneous, and everything she never intended to portray in front of the media, she wondered later – too late, she realised – why it had never occurred to her, not once, to simply answer no to that photographer's final question. It was so easy to curse and shout and rage, so painless to silently hate Lucas for what he had done to her life, but why was it almost unthinkable to say that she didn't love him?
Never again would Peyton wish she wasn't invisible. She cursed herself, only weeks ago, for wanting to be noticed in the Los Angeles crowd. What she wouldn't give, now, to go back to that anonymity, to that never-ending sameness. Back to what Brooke so bemoaned: being one in a thousand pretty girls.
How she yearned to be able to walk down the street and not have to worry she would be recognised. How she wished she could walk to her work, as she had done every day before, and trail her way leisurely through cafés and flea markets. How she hoped that soon, through some miracle, some work of divine intervention, some other Girl In A Book would come along and enthusiastically steal her place in the spotlight.
So one day in her kitchen she grabbed a pair of scissors out of a cutlery drawer and cut a blunt fringe into her curly locks. She looked uncertainly at the hair pooling at her feet and promptly lopped off a couple of inches of length for good measure until her hair sat unevenly somewhere around her shoulders. Then, to finish the job, she walked straight to the nearest hairdresser and got her hair dyed almost black at the roots. The tips faded out into an ashy kind of blonde that was somehow completely different from her original glossy golden, despite being only a few shades darker. She developed a constant uniform of shabby combat boots, black jeans and Ray-Bans. It was edgier; grungier; less feminine. Perhaps, Peyton thought, eyeing herself critically in her mirror, it didn't altogether suit her.
But this Peyton, unlike the Peyton from two years ago, didn't care one bit about how she looked. And any change, unflattering or not, which would shake off her previous life, was surely for the best.
After two long years in Los Angeles, Peyton Sawyer had learned many lessons. And the most profound of them all was not about the people or the attitude or the L.A. style. It was a lesson about herself.
She learned that anything at all which reminded her, or anyone else, of her past in Tree Hill, was shameful. She learned the hard way about how to shrink into the shadows and throw off her former identity so cleanly it was as if the old Peyton never existed.
In Los Angeles, people would eventually get over Lucas' book, and get over her. She knew it was only a matter of time. It was the way the throwaway news cycle worked: out of the magazines; out of mind. Even now, two months after the book's release, the paparazzi was slowly getting fewer; the public sightings thankfully on the decline.
But in Tree Hill, North Carolina, she knew she would perpetually be the girl in the book. She knew if she went home, she couldn't go anywhere without getting stared at and talked about. In L.A., soon enough she would be refreshingly faceless again: a nobody; a has-been. In Tree Hill, she had this warped, forced identity.
She had decided a long time ago now that she was not the girl in the book. Perhaps she never was. She didn't ask for the fame; she never deserved the recognition.
And that was why the biggest thing two years in Los Angeles had taught Peyton Sawyer was that she was never – ever – going back to Tree Hill.