we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.
-CHINESE PROVERB
By the time you read this, I hope to be dead.
You can't undo something that's happened; you can't take back a word that's already been said out loud. You'll think about me and wish that you had been able to talk me out of this. You'll try to figure out what would have been the one right thing to say, to do. I guess I should tell you, Don't blame yourself; this isn't your fault, but that would be a lie. We both know that I didn't get here by myself.
You'll cry, at my funeral. You'll say it didn't have to be this way. You will act like everyone expects you to. But will you miss me?
More importantly-will I miss you?
Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?
March 6, 2007
In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake cookies or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.
Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It's the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It's the driving distance from the Tree Hill to the town of Charleston, North Carolina.
In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem.
In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it.
In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.
It took nineteen minutes for Jimmy Edwards to fire a pistol and for Peyton Sawyer to be left mortally wounded bleeding out in the school corridor...alone.
So we shall start this story as it begun:
The start to the day had been fairly normal in the eyes of Peyton Sawyer, nothing more, nothing less. The usual routine, jocks goofing around at lockers, cheerleaders figuring out what their next routine would be. Peyton walks among these superficial dilenquents whose biggest problems are the sizes of their egos as well as their self obsessiveness.
From what she already knows her best friend of ten years Brooke Davis will be catching a ride with Lucas Scott.
Lucas Scott the boy she has been in love with for the better part of the year, it isn't like she hates seeing her best friend happy and in love but it doesn't make the pain hurt any less. It is like being smothered by an enormous pillow and unable to scream at the perpetrator to stop.
Just stop so that she could at least breath the one breath that would keep her alive.
Pushing the thought to the back of her mind, she adjusts the strap of her messenger bag farther up her shoulder and walks at a steady pace towards where she can see the blue tint of her locker. Just behind the glass doors.
It feels to her as though she is just a shell of herself watching her body go through the motions of just walking. But when she glances up the sigh that she is about to let out gets stuck right in the walls of her throat. She smiles at first because it's Luke's friend and he has always been pretty cool from what she can recall, but when she takes note of the state of him it quickly dissolved into what can only be deemed as confusion.
Her heart instantly starts to race, causing a glow of cold sweat to form across her forehead.
There practically standing right in front of her is Jimmy Edwards, a pinch to his brows and biting his lip so hard that she starts to think that it might bleed. His shaking like hell, his skin almost blue with physical illness. Pupils black with an emotion she can't quite place but it distinctively resembles fear.
With one look at him she can tell that he doesn't want to be there. But it seems that her focus hasn't been completed garnered until she hears a unmistakable sound of a gunshot ringing out and stealing away any sense of normalcy about the day.
Shots fire…at least three more shots. Loud enough to send her ears ringing.
And she has no idea what is happening at first, just knows that the glass door that she was just standing behind is in jagged glassy remnants on the floor beneath her.
She would've moved if she could, she swore that she would've.
Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling one another. A boy holding a handmade sign in an upstairs window that read help us. Two girls hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting red on the concrete; it was the drip of parents that turned into a stream and then a raging river, screaming out the names of their missing children. Chaos was a TV camera in your face, not enough ambulances, not enough officers, and no plan for how to react when the world as you knew it went to pieces.
Adrenaline pulses through her, making the edges of her vision swim and her senses more acute. She tries in vain to move again with baited breaths, when a burning sensation begins to blaze from four spots on her body.
Her shoulder.
Two spots on her stomach
And her thigh.
Green eyes wide with terror her eyes slowly travel down to the four spots that are soaking her denim jeans and white top rapidly with hot red. And she crumples in a heap onto the hard floor.
And that's when the pain really kicked in.
She would love to be able to tell herself that it is just glass. Glass in various places all over her weak body, but even that is just wistful thinking. Even for her.
A horrible gurgling noise sounds in her ears and she realized it is coming from her. She is shivering hard and the pain is so unbearable that she finds herself praying for death. An all new bloom of sweat begins to break out down her back and on her forehead.
She can feel her lungs beginning to squeeze, and her breaths are starting to come in agonizingly painful and terribly short gasps. Every breath she swears is a knife turning inside her. A violent cough rattles through her and it sends specks of blood seeping from her parched lips.
And in that moment she begins to accept that this is truly going to be the end for her.
LPLPLPLPLPLPLPLPLPLPLPLPLPLPLP
Lucas sits at a red light in his ruby red mustang, waiting to turn onto the highway. Beside him in the passenger seat sits his perky girlfriend Brooke Davis, who is in more than a huff at him due to another heated discussion about Peyton.
He can distantly hear her talking to him yet something on the radio causes his ears to prick up drowning her out completely.
He fiddles with the volume button of the dispatch radio just in time to hear...
"Breaking news all hell has seemed to break loose at Tree Hill High School, a mass shooting at the school has broken out, it is unclear if there are any survivors at this point but teachers and officers of the law have made quick work in getting as many students to safety as possible. The shooter has appeared to be holding hostages inside the building and it is still unclear as if anyone is alive or dead"
The light turned green, but Lucas doesn't move. It is as though he is paralysed by his own panic and terror.
Lucas doubles up, gasping, as a horrible feeling of ice cold fear washes over him. He throws out a hand to steady himself, and a wave of nausea breaks over him as he sees his skin turning from a light tan brown to pale. His eyes start to blur with the remnants of tears, but he won't let them fall he doesn't know for sure yet. And his not sure he wants to.
He grips the stearing wheel so hard that his knuckles feel like they're catching fire.
As one thought and one thought alone screams in his mind, richocheting through his body in unison.
PEYTON.
Brooke's voice becomes even more of a blur in the background, he doesn't have a clue what she's saying just knows that she is as frantic as he was.
Lucas turns his silvery blue eyes towards Brooke, who squirms. His throat suddenly feeling very dry.
"Where's Peyton Brooke?" He all but blurts out and if it was under any normal circumstance he is sure his jealous girlfriend would normally be halfway through taking his head off. But now isn't the time.
He watches as droplets begin to make their way down her ghostly face, identical to the shade he is now.
"...At school" she whispers hoarsely.
That is all he needs to hear.
Before he can even fathom what his doing his body is doing the job for him and the small car flies swiftly down the busy streets in the direction of Tree Hill High. It is only a matter of time before they make it, Lucas pulls halfway onto the sidewalk opposite school, the fires of adrenaline blazing like a phoenix through his blood stream.
He could make craters in the concrete at the pace he is going, hell he half expected there to be smoke and skid marks. He must look crazy, arms flailing wildly and literally red in the face. He runs until he comes across someone familiar.
Haley.
Her eyes are swollen and bloodshot from tears, her nose much resembling that of the infamous Ruldolph the reindeer. No doubt a huge reflection of how he looks.
She launches herself into him, clinging to him for dear life and he can barely understand her through her muffled words. He pulls away holding her by her shoulders at arms length. His eyes pleading with her to shed some information about Peyton's where abouts and come to think of it...
Where the hell is his brother?
"Haley..w-what happened, where's Nathan...where's Peyton?" He find himself wondering out loud and whispering the last part due to not being able to conceive such a thought of the fact that Peyton could very well be dead.
He prays in vain that she is just one of the hostages, scared but untouched alongside his younger brother. But the little voice in the back of his head tells him that it's a long shot indeed and that's when alarm bells start going of in his head.
He refuses to let it dawn on him, there is absolutely no way that Peyton Sawyer is dead. Haley's eyes are far off.
Haunted.
Shocked.
Probably both if he is being honest with himself.
He can't blame her for not being able to talk sense in this moment, a situation like this is enough to fuck up the best of people.
But it doesn't stop the will to get her to tell him from kicking in and he finds himself demanded her for answers, he grips her shoulders quite violently in an almost bruising grip.
"DAMMIT HALEY TELL ME!" He roars and feels as Brooke's restraining hands pull him back. He runs a trembling hand through his grown out flaxen hair. Focusing on breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth just to keep himself from going insane.
He wants his mom.
"I'm going in" he declares almost deliriously starting towards the building but he only makes it a couple steps before he is yanked back by strong arms and he turna wildly ready to punch the person.
He is met with the sable brown eyes of his uncle Keith and as if conjuring her up his mother. He wants to cry and scream all at once but it comes out in the form of a desperate sob. And he doesn't care how he looks to everyone else, hell at this point he doesn't care if people are scribbling about him on the toilet walls - Lucas Scott is a big cry baby.
"Keith I gotta go in...you have to let me go in she's in there" he pleads attempting again to go back towards the school but Keith grabs him and begins dragging him a safe distance away.
He fights with everything he has, insane with the thought that no one is gonna let him into that school even if he is the president himself.
"KEITH GET OFF ME!" He growls and is relieved when his uncle finally loosens his grip. He begins taking a threatening step towards Keith with gritted teeth.
"So your just gonna let her die in there?" He asks incredulously.
He can't care less how much of a scene he is causing, they don't understand. God no one understood. His attempts at telling himself that a normal friend would act like this over any other friend in a situation is futile because he knows that it transcends that. And so does everybody else.
But he is stopped by his mothers hand on his chest her blue eyes glossed up in the evident tell tail signs of tears as well.
No words are exchanged as she pulls him wordlessly down towards her into a tight embrace and he clenches his teeth together in an attempt to stop another sob from crawling its way up his throat. He clings to his mom like that of a newborn baby, his breaths sounding shallow to his own ears. And his frozen and crippled by the knowledge that every moment he stands out here, every seconds that goes by is another minute that he fails her.
"Mom...I love her..." He whispers, only loud enough for her to hear as he finally lets the dam break and the droplets finally from his irritated tear ducts.
"I know" she utters to him, rubbing his back in a soothing manner.
"I know"
Authors Note: I've had this story just chilling in my documents for a while so I decided that I would post it for you guys. As for whether I continue it that is up to you, this has no reflection to my life whatsoever, I've never been shot and I hope not to be in the future. This story will probably be put on the back burner and I will update where I can but I wanna focus more on With Wreaths Of Withered Flowers right now because its sort of a top priority for me. Pop me a review and tell me what you think?
Thanks.