Chapter Two: Hello, Blair
•••
"Blair." Noah called out as he cut across the morning crowd in the school hallway to where he spotted her at her locker. "Morning." He added, coming to a stop beside her and adjusting the straps on his backpack.
"Oh, hey." She greeted, glancing over at him for a moment before her attention went back to the books stacked on the top metal shelf.
"Good morning." He said with a nervous laugh forming on his lips at the realization he'd already greeted her with nearly the same words just seconds before.
"Morning." She replied, arching a brow as she looked over at him and held back at laugh of her own. Turning to face him, a serious look graced her features when she questioned, "How are you?"
"I'm good. I'm okay." He internally cringed as his inability to slow his speaking down to a normal pattern. Much like the night before at the party, his being around her was causing his heart to pick up speed and he was also aware of his palms growing increasingly sweaty as he clutched onto the shoulder straps of his book bag and now he seemed to be rushing through his words as if he couldn't say them fast enough.
"You sure?" She asked, a slight look of disbelief prevalent on her face as he stared back at her with his mouth slightly hanging open.
"Yeah." He nodded almost frantically, and just like at the party he could feel his soul starting to wither and die within him. What he wouldn't have given to have been graced the calmness and charm that he'd seen boys on the basketball team use to woo the girls.
"I'm just going to…" He breathed, rubbing a hand through his neatly combed hair and leaving it look slightly disheveled. Pulling a quick, harsh breath between his teeth he shrugged, "I'll see you in class?"
With that he turned around and took a few steps away before coming to a stop and remembering why he had decided to approach her in the first place that morning before classes began.
Turning back around he watched as she grabbed a text book off the shelf and shut her locker. Realizing he needed to catch her before she disappeared into the shuffling crowds of half-asleep students, he called out, "Blair!"
"Noah?" She laughed, turning back to face him as he rushed back over to her. She was just about to tell him how she needed to make it across the school before the bell rang, but he said, "I just wanted to thank you, you know for helping save my life… in the lake last night, when-"
"I remember what happened." She said with a small, empathetic smile.
"Yeah, of course you do." He nodded, looking down to his shoes for a moment before trying to make light of the situation and adding, "I would have thanked you last night, but it was hard to say much of anything when I couldn't stop coughing up the lake water."
"Tell me about it." She agreed, "I swear it took half a bottle of shampoo to get the lake smell out of my hair."
"You're welcome, by the way." She quickly added, "Though, in truth, I wasn't much help. If Kieran hadn't been right behind me, we'd both probably have drowned."
"Either way, there were a lot of people still at the party and you were the first one to come to my aide." Offering up a smile; he continued, "It was actually pretty bad-ass when you think about it. You just charged right into lake Brandon James died in –not a lot of people would have the balls to do that."
"I do have my ballsy moments." She laughed. Shrugging she breathed her admission, "Actually, I have a bad habit of diving head first into situations without thinking them through. I don't tend to think about the consequences until after the fact and by then…"
Her voice trailed off and he caught the glimpse of emotion in her eyes, before she shook her head and cleared her throat, "Well, by the time you're hit with the consequences it's too late."
"You, uh…" He breathed, "You seem to be speaking from personal experience, there." Noah pointed out, taking a step closer to her and wondering where her mind had gone.
"I just, I sort of went through something when I lived in Atlanta. It's not important though." She quickly dismissed, only Noah got the feeling that it was a big deal and commented, "Sounds kind of important."
"I was mainly talking about what happened in the lake." Blair said, nearly cutting his statement off as she spoke. "I charged in there to help you and didn't really give much thought to what was going to happen when I got to you –like, if there was someone or something in the water. Kieran tried to tell me to wait, but I just drove right in."
Swallowing hard, he nodded. In truth, he was still haunted by what had happened the night before, not only how his classmates had left him out on a floating dock to fend for himself in nothing but his boxer shorts, but in the way that he could have sworn something was in the water with him.
Trying to make a joke over it, he laughed, "Just some handsy fishing line apparently."
His words earned a small smile from her, but it didn't reach her eyes –something he easily picked up on.
"You okay?"
"It's just…" Blair sighed, "We can make a joke about it, but you almost died, Noah. And if we're being one-hundred percent honest… the last time I checked, fishing line wasn't capable of sprouting hands and dragging a person under water."
With slightly widened eyes, he realized, "You felt something too?"
"More like someone." Her voice lowered and she leaned in as she spoke, "When I got to you, you were frantic and flailing your arms every which way. I was trying to help you, but you kept splashing all this water in my face and then something brushed against my leg under the water and I just remember completely freezing with realizing that whatever was in that lake with us was way bigger than a fish. I could have sworn I felt a hand on my ankle too, right as I got dragged down."
The faint scent of her perfume tickled his nose, and it took his normally fast brain an unusually long time to process everything she'd said. Something he immediately regretted, when she clearly took his lack of response as disbelief.
Stepping back, Blair tried to act unfazed and shrugged, "Hey, maybe we really are caught in some real life horror story."
"Half of the town swears that Brandon James is back and the others think Tyler killed Nina." Noah nodded, before admitting to her, "I thought someone was in the lake last night too."
"The killer could have been in the water with us." Blair stated the obvious, but saying it out loud forced the weight of the words to start sinking in and suddenly her skin still felt slimy from the lake, like she needed another hour in the shower to wash the feeling away.
The bell rang and she turned to head in the direction of her first class. Pausing for a moment to turn back at him and ask, "Hey… you're the slasher movie expert. So, what do you think? Is Brandon James really back? Or did Tyler kill Nina?"
"You know…" Noah said, as he started to walk with her, even though his first class was in the opposite direction, "You have to remember that the "who-dun-it", may not be all that important in our story."
"So the question is more of a 'why'? Why did they target Nina?" Blair guessed, causing Noah to smirk as he looked over at her and argued "No."
"What I'm saying is that you need to forget it's a horror story. Forget that someone might die at every turn." He added.
Blair's eyebrows raised as they continued to walk together and he couldn't help but smile at her clear interest in everything he was saying. There weren't a whole lot of people he could have these conversations with.
As it was, the sheriff had already stopped him on his way into the school to ask if he could come in for questioning the next morning.
"You see." Noah continued, nodding towards their English classroom where their teacher, Mr. Branson was standing far too close to Brooke, who was sitting on his desk. "You have to care if the smokin' hot lit teacher seems a little too interested in his female students."
Motioning to the basketball team noisily making their way past them down the hallway all dressed in red and white uniforms, Noah commented, "You have to care of the team wins the big game."
"You, uh…" He breathed, running his tongue over his lips as he looked around for another example to point out. His eyes stopped on where Will was trying to talk to Emma, but she slammed her locker and walked away from him. With a nod in their direction, Noah sad, "You have to care if the smart, pretty girl, forgives the dumb jock."
"So by taking the horror element out of it, it's pretty much your everyday teen drama?" She laughed, coming to a stop outside of her classroom.
"Exactly." Noah nodded, the smirk still on his lips as he spoke, "You get attached to them, their struggles become your own. You root for them, you love them. So when they are brutally murdered… it hurts."
With an unreadable look in her eyes, Blair pointed out, "You've really given a lot of thought to all of this."
"I think about this stuff." He shrugged, the proud smirk falling from his lips as he started to wonder if he'd just scared her off. He made a mental note that he should tone back on his morbid thoughts when speaking to people he didn't know so well, this sort of thing was probably why the police wanted to speak to him in the first place.
"Okay." Blair nodded, glancing behind her to the classroom that was starting to fill up, before turning her attention back to Noah. "So, say you add the horror elements back into the teen drama. How does it end?"
"You might not like the answer." Noah cautioned.
"I haven't cared for much of anything since I moved back to Lakewood." Blair gave him a coy smile when she added, "Except talking to you."
Appearing stunned by the comment, it took him a while to find his voice again, and he stammered out, "You really want to know how it ends?"
"I do." She nodded.
Looking around them, he took a step closer and lowered his voice so that anyone walking past wouldn't hear them. "Everyone has secrets. Everyone tells lies and everyone is fair game…"
"Even the girl who just moved back home?" Blair tried to joke, but there was an uneasy feeling in her stomach.
Nodding, Noah stated, "Until there's no one left."
"Great!" She sarcastically remarked, shaking her head and wishing she hadn't asked him in the first place. Without even thinking she breathed, "So I pretty much left one horror story behind, to move right into a different one?"
"What are you talking about?" Noah questioned, but didn't get an answer as the bell rang and he barely got a 'see you later' out of Blair before she rushed into the classroom.
•••
"Oh, I didn't know anyone was in here." Blair said, as she found Emma sitting on the floor against a wall in the girl's bathroom on the other side of the school from the loud, bustling cafeteria.
"Yeah." Emma weakly laughed, "With it being lunch time, I didn't really expect anyone to be on this side of the school." Clearing her throat she looked at her old friend and asked, "What are you doing in here?"
"Uh, thinking about pulling a Cady from Mean Girls, and eating my lunch in here alone." She half-joked, but Emma laughed like there was no truth to her words.
The Blair she knew, might not have ever been super popular, but she was also never the type to shy away from crowds. It didn't immediately occur to her that the girl who moved back home, might just be quite a bit different from when she moved away.
"I couldn't find Kieran in the cafeteria, and Audrey was sitting with Noah." Blair admitted, shrugging as she added, "Which is great, only I think the only conversations I've ever had with him have been about serial killers and I don't know, I just wanted to spend lunch alone, but clearly you did too and you've claimed this spot already, so I'll go."
"No, Blair… you can stay." Emma called out, patting the tile floor next to her as she spoke. "It's not you that I'm avoiding." With a shrug she continued, "I just don't think I handled being around the masses right now, but I wouldn't mind your company."
Slowly sitting down and laying her school bag in her lap, Blair looked over to Emma and asked, "Anything you want to talk about?"
The blonde looked down and smiled, a year apart and Blair was still the type of person who'd ask what was wrong, and really care about the answer. She'd missed her, missed having her to talk too. Growing up, she'd always been able to tell her anything and she never felt judged. It had been a long time since she'd felt that way.
"Not really." Emma admitted, "But I think I might have to."
Blair readjusted on the floor, and Emma pulled in a deep breath before she asked, "Are you and Kieran just friends?" Her eyes pinned shut as she added, "I just mean, I know you guys know each other from Atlanta and I was just wondering if there was something between you. You seem comfortable with each other… pretty close."
"We're friends." Blair answered with nothing but honesty in her tone. "We've only ever been friends." With raised brows she questioned, "Does this have anything to do with you guys coming out of the greenhouse alone at the party?"
"We kissed." Emma admitted, seeming to hardly believe the words she was saying. She wasn't sure if it was the beer and spiked punch she'd been drinking, or if finding out Will had slept with Nina, had made her want to do something to hurt him back.
She never imagined herself kissing someone else while she was still with Will, especially not a guy that she'd only just met.
"Okay." Blair nodded, "Is that why you're hiding out in here?"
"It's why I needed to talk to you about it." Emma quickly said, "It's nice having you back, you know? I meant it when I told you how much I missed you and the last thing I'd want would be to mess things up between us because of kissing some guy."
"Kieran is more than just some guy." Blair un-intentionally snapped, leading Emma to wonder if Blair was being honest about how she felt.
Sighing at herself, Blair said, "That didn't come out right. I meant what I said, we're just friends. But that's it, he's more than 'just some guy', he's my friend."
"Right." Emma nodded, adding with a smile, "I was just thinking about in fifth grade when we swore we'd be friends forever and not let anything come between us, even when we both had a crush on the same guy."
The memory earned a smile from Blair, though she bit her tongue at pointing out how they'd both let many things come between them since they'd made that vow.
"To answer your question." Emma began, "I'm in here because I'm avoiding Will, mainly. He expects me to just forgive him for sleeping with Nina, and I know no one is perfect. We all make mistakes, but that was such a huge mistake and I honestly feel like an idiot. I really thought we had something special."
"Don't do that." Blair argued, "You always internalize everything bad that happens, like it's all your fault and it's not. Whatever reasons Will had for ever having sex with Nina is because of him, and not because of you."
"I know." Emma nodded, twirling her blonde hair around her finger as she nodded. A tell-tale sign that there was more to the situation then what she was letting on.
"Then what's going on?" Blair pushed.
Letting out a small sigh, Emma confided. "I just keep going over everything in my head. All the sweet moments since we started dating and then wondering how many times I overlooked things because of how much I liked Will. Maybe if I stopped trying to believe that deep down everyone is good, then maybe I'd get hurt less."
"Maybe." Blair agreed, "But your want to always see the best in people is one of your best traits, Em."
"Either way, it doesn't change what happened. Will slept with Nina, Brooke knew the entire time and never told me until she'd had too much to drink and it slipped out, and then as if the entire situation wasn't messy enough –I kissed Kieran in the greenhouse."
Rubbing her hands over her face, her voice was muffled as she added, "I'm just so confused about it all."
"Do you regret it?"
"What?"
"Kissing Kieran… do you regret kissing him?"
Emma's mouth opened, but she soon realized she didn't have an answer at the ready. Or at least not the answer she expected to have. Technically she was still in a relationship with Will and she should have felt bad for the kiss.
"Two wrongs don't make a right." Emma vaguely replied, though she knew Blair wouldn't let her off that easy.
"Do you regret it?" Blair repeated.
"Truthfully…" Emma breathed, before she closed her eyes and exhaled, "No, I don't regret it."
"Then maybe you're not as confused about it as you think you are." Blair offered up what seemed to be the simplest bit of wisdom, but the words hit her friend hard.
The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch and both girls got to their feet and began dusting off their clothes.
Finally, Blair looked at her and said, "Look, I don't know Will Belmont very well, actually, I don't know him at all. But I do know Kieran, and underneath that tough exterior, he is a really good guy, Em. The truth is, I don't think I'd have survived Atlanta without him-"
"What happened?" Emma asked, cutting her off and growing worried by the broken look that filled Blair's brown hues.
"I don't want to talk about it." Blair stated, her tone making the room feel frigid.
"There was a time when we told each other everything." Emma couldn't help but point out. Everytime she got around Blair, it started to feel like old times again and it hurt to know she was holding something back.
"The point is; I don't know Will, but I know Kieran and I don't want to see him get hurt. So maybe you should really work on figuring out what you want before the situation gets any messier." Blair said, as she pulled the strap of her bag on over her shoulder and turned to leave the room –ignoring Emma's voice as she called after her.
•••
With a tired sigh, Blair sat down at her computer desk and opened up her laptop with a plan to finish up the last of her homework for the night. A plan which quickly got tossed to the side as she instead went to check her new social media pages she'd set up earlier that week.
She'd been hesitant to make new accounts since deleting all of hers while she was in Atlanta. In truth, she still wasn't sure about having an online presence again, but she'd been working hard to put everything that had happened behind her and get back to a state of normal. Though, she wasn't entirely sure she knew what normal meant anymore, let alone if it were still an achievable state of existence to strive for.
The breath she'd pulled in between her teeth had nestled in for an extended stay in her lungs while she looked over the short list of her newest followers on Instagram. Her eyes slightly wide and highly alert as she scanned for any names or pictures of people she knew from Atlanta, or any profiles that looked like fake accounts.
Finally letting out the breath she'd been holding, a smile spread over her lips when she saw Noah was following her.
Moving the cursor over his name, she paused for a moment before finally clicking it and opening up his page.
Curiosity got the best of her, and before she could stop herself she was clicking through one photo after another. There were only a few actual pictures of him on there. There were a few of him and Audrey, several pics of a cat –which judging from the captions on the posts, she gathered he must not be too fond of. She wasn't the least bit surprised as she clicked through several horror movie memes and found several pictures documenting his high score achievements on video games; most of which she'd never ever heard of.
Just as she came across one of his few selfies, she heard her mom ask, "And who is that?"
Looking over her shoulder to where her mom was hovering, Blair admitted, "His name is Noah Foster."
Emily's eyes squinted for a mere second before they widened and she remembered, "Wasn't he in the paper?"
"Yeah, the SpaceX thing." Blair nodded, looking back to her computer.
When her daughter didn't offer up any more information, Emily asked, "You like him?"
"He's Audrey's friend." Blair explained, clicking to the next picture of some sort of collectable action figures, she stared at it for a moment before continuing, "He's nice."
"You do like him, don't you?" Her mom picked up on her change in behavior and smiled. At first moving back home to Lakewood sounded like a good idea, but after one of her daughters classmates had been murdered, she'd been wondering if they should have just started over fresh somewhere else. But it seemed like Blair was adjusting to life there nicely and after everything they'd been through, that was really all she could hope for.
"I never said that!" Blair quickly exclaimed, and her mother argued, "Well, I don't see you looking up pictures of Audrey's other friends."
"I don't think she has any other friends."
"There's that girl from the video-"
"Mom!" Blair gasped, cutting her off as she stood up and turned around to face her. "How did you even see that?"
"I do go online, you know. That video was everywhere." Emily pointed out, before she held her hands up and said, "I'm not judging. You know I don't care if she's gay-"
"She swears she's not a lesbian." Blair corrected her.
"Either way!" Emily said, loudly speaking over her daughter. "How's she holding up?"
"Better than I would be." Blair admitted, "She's not hiding or anything, she's sort of owning what happened. I'm proud of her."
Emily smiled, until her gaze went back to the computer and she asked, "Did you make a new Instagram account?"
When her daughters gaze fell to the floor, she sighed in disappointment, "Blair…"
"Everyone has an Instagram, mom." She defended.
"What about Facebook and Chirpster? Did you rejoin those sites too?" She pushed, the disappointed expression on her face growing by the second.
"It's not a big deal!" Blair tried to brush it off, "I'm keeping an eye on my followers and I haven't gotten any harassing messages. If someone from Atlanta contacts me, I'll call dad. It's okay."
"It is not okay." Emily softly said, though her tone was stern. "Putting yourself back out there like that…" Blowing out a sigh, she pointed out, "You kids don't get it. Everything you put online is there forever… and Blair, can't people use social media outlets to track your movements?"
"It's not like I'm tagging where I'm at twenty-four/seven, mom. In fact, I don't ever tag my location. I'm being careful. You can trust me." She pleaded.
"I do trust you." Emily assured her, nodding to the open computer as she added, "It's everyone else that I don't trust."
Not wanting to fight with her mom, or be reminded again of everything that happened before they moved back to Lakewood, Blair said, "I need to finish up my homework."
"You sure you'll be fine here tonight?" Emily asked, "Maybe I shouldn't have picked up a shift in the E.R tonight."
"I'll be fine here alone. I'm probably going to be going to bed soon anyways." Blair offered up a smile. Moving her hands in a shooing motion she said, "Now go on, Dr. Bradford… go save some lives."
Cracking a smile, Emily said, "I'll try to be back in the morning in time to drop you off at school-"
"Kieran's coming by in the morning to take me to school anyways, don't worry about it."
After giving her mom a hug and following her to the door to lock up after she left for the nightshift at the hospital, Blair returned to her bedroom and plopped back into her desk chair.
After failing again to work on her homework, she ended up back on social media and had accepted Facebook friend requests from a few different people. It was mere seconds after accepting Noah's request that her phone rang with the number showing up as unknown.
"Hello?" She asked as she brought the phone up to her ear.
"Hello, Blair."
Her eyebrows lowered at the unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line.
"Who is this?" She questioned.
"Guess."
Her posture straightened and tensed, fighting against the urge to just end the call and shut her phone off, she flatly stated, "I'm not really in the mood. Seriously, who is this? Because you've got about three seconds until I'm hanging up-"
"I'm closer than you think."
"What does that even mean?" She demanded to know. A sick feeling rose in her stomach and her skin felt prickly, like watching a horror movie and knowing the killer was right around the next corner.
"Figure it out."
With that the voice on the other end of the line broke off into a laugh, which made the air in Blair's room feel like it had been depleted of every last ounce of oxygen.
It no longer felt like her own, safe space. The room now felt like there were eyes staring at her from every corner, like she were no longer alone in the house.
Standing up, she kept the phone pressed to her ear and walked over to her open bedroom door and looked out into the hallway, staying as silent possible to listen for any sign of movement.
"Are you scared?"
"No." She surprised herself with how strong her own voice sounded, despite the fact her knees were starting to shake.
"Then why are you checking in the hallway?"
Her mouth hung open with a feeling like a hand had reached through her sternum and squeezed all the air from her lungs.
"You… you're watching me?" She somehow managed to say as she looked around, before darting over to her bedroom window and looking out to the streetlight illuminated street.
"Are you really that surprised? That is what you want, right? On Instagram and Facebook? All those smiling pictures and fake perfect lives."
Pulling her curtains shut, Blair leaned her back against the wall and stared at her bedroom doorway as she hissed into the phone, "This isn't funny anymore. Who the hell is this?"
"You'll learn the truth soon enough, for now all you need to know is that I'm the one who's going to tear it all down."
The other end of the phone went silent and she slowly moved the curtains to peek outside again, but she still didn't see anyone.
When her computer chimed with a message alert, she nearly jumped out of her skin. Still clutching her phone tightly in her hand, she slowly crept closer to her computer and sat down in the chair.
With a shaky hand, Blair reached forward and swiped a finger across her mousepad to bring the screen back to life.
Her gaze fell to the corner to the screen where the Facebook messenger was showing she had a new message from Noah Foster that simply read 'Hey'.
She stared at her built-in webcam for a moment before she slammed her computer shut in a fit of panic and jerked the power cord out of it, before flipping the entire thing over and popping out the battery to cut every last bit of power to the laptop.
Her heart was still racing wildly in her chest and for the moment, nothing felt stable. Not her body or her mind, truth be told, she wasn't entirely sure she was even safe in her own house now.
Could it have been a coincidence that she'd gotten that phone call right after accepting Noah's friend requests online and then right after the call ended she got a message from him? He'd seemed nice enough, but maybe she'd been wrong about him.
Maybe his obsession with serial killers should have been a huge red flag, but in truth, she'd enjoyed their talks and hearing his theories.
Almost everyone is interested in the dark details. Like driving past a car accident and slowing down to get a better a look, out loud you say you hope everyone is alright, while you've got your eyes peeled for the gore.
Wrapping her arms around herself, Blair leaned back in her desk chair and thought of how she'd much rather be the passerby –than the car wreck. Rather be the observer than the item on display.
•••
A/N- Thanks for reading! I really hope you all enjoyed the chapter. ^_^
I'd also like to take a moment to thank Emmettluver2010, MzzLightwood, xxXWolfsLullabyXxx, Guest, MORE, RHatch89, Katniss789, Guest, screamingfordays, ana, Straight Edge Queen, ABANDON3D PAG3, Kira Tsumi and Guest for reviewing the first chapter!
You all really made me so happy! I wasn't sure if there would be any response to this story or not, but so glad to see that there is and I'm hoping you'll all stick with me as I tell more of Blair's story.
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