Summary: Sequel to Best Friends for Never. Much has changed in the drama-filled lives of the teens of Tree Hill. With Haley across the continent, Peyton and Jake at NYU, and Lucas, Nathan, and Brooke at Duke, still on the East Coast, she was sure that their friendships had dissipated. Or at least that was what she thought before Brooke convinced her to move to New York after her college graduation.
I've been down the wrong road tonight
and I swear ill never go there again
I've seen this face once before
and I don't think I can do this again
-Three Doors Down
Haley was throwing clothes absently around her dorm room, not caring where they fell or if they were wrinkled or not. She didn't care at all. All she wanted was for things to be normal. She wanted the life she had worked so hard to achieve to come back. She wanted to be able to say that she had gotten the full college experience without any regrets. But she couldn't say any of that. She couldn't say that she was happy. She couldn't say that she was in love. She couldn't say that she had made any life-long friends. She couldn't say that these were the best years of her life.
She felt like that ship had sailed before she even stepped foot on the college campus four years before. She crumpled into a ball on the carpeted dorm room floor, her shoulders rocking with the sobs that were filling her body.
She must have sat that way for a good quarter of an hour, tears streaming down her face in agony, when her roommate opened the door. Claire was all smiles and bubbles, but at the sight of her trashed room and hysterical roommate, the smile fell from her face like the crack of thunder (not that you saw that much in California). She quickly fell to her knees in front of Haley, pushing the girl's curly blonde hair from her tear-stained face. She was shocked by this Haley. She had never seen outgoing, loving, crazy, bubbly, smart, Haley, sobbing in all the years that they had been roommates.
"Haley, honey, what's wrong?" Clair was the kind of person that you could count on. She never had anything bad to say, and she was there for you when you needed a shoulder to cry on; but Haley never let herself cry, much less use someone else's shoulder to do it on. She was a pre-psych major, so she knew how to listen and when to say something that was encouraging and when to give tough-love.
"Everything. I don't know why I came here. I don't know why I stayed. I don't know anything." She sobbed into the crook of her friend's neck, her legs strewn at odd angles around her body, and her hands shielding her face from view.
"Haley, I don't know what's the matter, but you're the smartest person I know." Haley just sobbed louder at her friend's words. This was the only true friend she had found in the past four years. All the others were just as fake and plastic as they had been in high school. But Haley couldn't blame them, could she? She had done the same thing, saying that she was 'reinventing' herself, when really she was throwing on a Brooke mask and calling it a Haley.
"But that's the thing. I'm smart. I should have been smart four years ago and gone with my gut, and not with what my parents would disapprove of. I should have done what made me happy. I shouldn't have left him. I loved him so much." Just the thought of him made her heart stop beating for a second.
"Who? Jason?" Jason was Haley's boyfriend. The guy she should be sobbing about; but of course she wasn't. There was only one man on the face of the planet that could make her so happy and so sad; and he was nowhere on the Stanford campus. He was nowhere in California. He was nowhere on the west coast. He was in the place that she loved, and the place that she should be right now, if not for the place itself, then for the boy that made it the best place in the world.
Haley just shook her head and wiped her tears, ashamed that she had let herself breakdown. The last time she had done that was four years ago. She had held it in for so long, she wasn't even sure what it felt like to be happy; but she knew that this wasn't it. She removed herself quickly from her friends embrace and crawled to her bed, climbing into it and wrapping the blankets around her like a protective shield.
After that she just sobbed as quietly as possible into her pillow, replaying pictures in her head, trying to remember what happiness felt like; and trying to remember what it was like to feel anything.
Claire was completely confused. She wasn't sure if she should press the issue further, or if she should let her friend wallow in her own self pity. She decided on the latter when she saw the way Haley was trying to muffle her sobs so she wouldn't hear them. She knew that Haley was strong, but she was afraid that if she didn't get whatever this was, out of her system, she might kill herself slowly from the inside out.
Haley was awoken from her dreams of the past by an insistent jingling noise coming from near the foot of her bed. She looked over to the bed that usually housed her roommate, but only found an empty bed with a small 5x4 sheet of paper pinned to the pillow.
She untangled herself from her thick quilt that seemed unnecessary in the California heat, and stumbled to the bed across from hers still wearing the clothes she had worn the day before. Her jeans were rumpled, and her shirt wrinkled, but she didn't care, just like she didn't care that she had stepped on more than half her wardrobe as she walked across the small room.
She took the pin out of the pillow, and picked up the note. It had her name written across the front in frilly cursive that could only belong to two people she knew, and only one of them would be in her dorm room.
Hales,
I went to Brad's for the night.
I hope you feel better.
Try getting some rest and not worrying about classes. We're done with finals. All that's left is graduation.
Don't let the change affect you.
Much love & kisses
Claire
"BRRRDDRRRR"
The jingling sound filled the room again. That annoying sound that had woken her from her dreams filled with love and happiness that she hadn't felt since then. She was going to murder whoever was dumb enough to be making that noise at 7am.
She followed the jingling to her desk, and searched through her papers, trying to find anything capable of making such an annoying sound. She was interrupted from her search by a repeat of the sound. It was coming from her open laptop.
New E-mail from: Brookiee3
The message was flashing across the screen with that insistent dinging that was starting to give her a migraine. She opened the message, waited for it to load, and started reading, deciding that she wouldn't kill the person who was making the noise after all. She loved Brooke too much.
From: Brookiee3
To: Haley-bub23
Hales,
I got a call from Peyton the other day. She said that her graduation is next week! I am so excited that I think I might burst! All of us are officially adults once we get those diplomas (and don't give me that crap about legally being an adult when you turn 18, because I say you're an adult when you finish all the schooling crap). But I'm going up to NY today because, guess what? I'm moving in with Peyton! I know! I'm so excited! I'm going to be living in the biggest city in the country! No more little butt-crack town Tree Hill (just kidding; I love Tree Hill).
Anyways, Lucas and I are going up there later today after our graduation ceremony is over. I was kind of hoping that Lucas would ask me to move in with him, but you can't have everything, right? Lucas already has a roommate anyways; it came with the apartment apparently.
Now all we need is you. Get your cute little ass on a plane and out here as soon as possible. There is a third bedroom in the apartment Peyton and I are living in. We had to pay about double the price of a two-bedroom to have that third, so you better be here by the end of the month to pay rent.
I love you Hales. Always and Forever, remember?
Brookiee.
P.S. I downloaded your new single on myspace! Go Haley Jay! I don't know how you got into all that recording stuff, but I requested it on the Duke Radio and now I have the whole campus addicted to you! You'll be a huge star, yet!
Haley took a deep breath and started throwing things back into her closet. Even if she did choose to go to New York to be with the people she loves, she couldn't leave before graduation. That was only three days away though; she'd have to make a decision fast. Not that she had any other place to go. She could stay in California and get that apartment with Jason that he had been talking about; she could go back to Tree Hill and live with her parents for a little while until she got everything figured out; or she could go to New York and be with the people she loved the most in the world, minus one vital person.
She knew she had to choose, but right now, she just wanted coffee; and maybe a gas station counter's worth of chocolate.
Haley sighed, and threw her cheerleading uniform into her last suitcase. She couldn't believe that she had actually finished college. It seemed like just yesterday she was walking down the halls of Tree Hill High with her best friend standing next to her (or making out with him in the janitors closet, either way). No. Don't think about him. You haven't seen him in a long time. You'll kill yourself if you keep thinking like this. He probably has a new girlfriend and a new life where he doesn't need you.
Haley's thoughts had drifted to Nathan Scott more than a few times over the years, and even more in the past few weeks; but she would quickly rebuff them and tell herself that they had a good year, and it was fun while it lasted. They had tried the whole 'long-distance-relationship' thing, then it turned into 'long-distance-friendship', and then turned to calls and e-mails every month or so. They had changed too much, and been too far from each other for their relationship or friendship to stay intact.
She absentmindedly fiddled with the long skinny chain that hung from her neck, sticking her index finger through the small circle, tracing the edges with her other fingers.
She took a deep breath as she picked up her smaller suitcases to take out to her car. Her mind was still planted firmly on four years before, not watching where she was going as she walked blindly through the halls that she could maneuver in her sleep. She exited the sorority house and walked to her small car, trying to figure out where she was going to go once she was finished packing all of her things into her red VW beetle. She still hadn't decided where she was going. The thought of making that decision scared the hell out of her. She felt like this one decision would affect her entire life. This one choice was going to shape everything. And she couldn't make that kind of decision again. Not after she made the wrong one the last time.
She was interrupted from her thoughts by her boyfriend taking the bags from her hands, and putting them into her trunk. He seemed anxious about something, and she was slightly scared as to what could make Jason Rose scared. He wasn't one to be scared easily, and she was fully aware of that. She looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to say whatever he was trying to.
She had been dating him for three years, but was friends with him first. He knew that at the time, she had just come out of a really serious relationship, but he didn't seem to care. He kept asking her out daily, not being fazed one bit that she turned him down every time. It took forty-six 'no's' before she said 'yes'. And really it wasn't a 'yes' it was an 'okay, whatever, just stop asking me'. It took her a month and a half for her to accept his date. It took her three weeks after their first date to agree to go on a second one. It took her a night of crying and a call to Brooke who told her that Nathan was dating some blonde bimbo for her to say that she would go on a third. It took another year for her to sleep with him. And after he said he loved her six months later, she waited two months to say it back. And she still couldn't say it while looking into his expecting green eyes when she knew that she should be saying it to a pair of navy blue ones.
"Haley." She nodded, her eyebrows raised in a question. "Well, you know how we were talking about moving in together?" She nodded again, trying to gauge where this conversation was going, and how to break it to him that she didn't actually want to live with him. "Do you really love me?" She nodded reluctantly, and could feel the tears gathering in her big brown eyes. "Would you go with me if I went to New York?"
Well, there was the first chapter of the sequel of Best Friends for Never. I'm sorry that it had to be a cliffie, but I posted it long before I expected to, so it was kind of like a trade off. Obviously, I brought back the angst, but, frankly, I would get bored writing a fluffy Naley story.
Please Review.
-Keira
