Trigger Warning: Rape

"So where did you go last night?"

Riley's room was right next to her fourteen year old brother Auggie's room, who was the only person that ever knew when she snuck out and didn't come home. Riley shrugged, breathing through the pulsing in her head and the feeling of wrongness in her stomach. She felt like she was moving through water, or like she was dreaming. Something about this didn't feel real.

"Well you didn't come home," Auggie said.

"I know," Riley whispered, laying gingerly down on her bed. She knew she needed to take a shower, because every part of her body felt gross, even though she could see no real dirt on her skin. Her hair was messy, she knew she smelled like alcohol, but all she really wanted to do was go to sleep.

"You're lucky I told Mom you slept at Maya's," Auggie informed her.

"Thanks," Riley mumbled, turning over so that her brother wouldn't see the tears on her face.

But Auggie knew her too well to fall for that. "What's wrong?" He asked, getting up to cross the room to Riley.

"I just need to go to sleep, Aug," Riley mumbled, her voice cracking with barely controlled sobs.

"No, something happened," Auggie insisted, sitting down next to her shoulder. "What happened?"

Riley crunched her body as small as she could, her body shaking as her sobs cracked out of her. Auggie laid down next to her and held his sister, trying to help.

"What happened, Riley?" He whispered, and Riley's reply forced out of her throat.

"I think I was raped."

Auggie let her cry for as long as she could before insisting that she needed to tell someone.

"I can't," Riley insisted back. "You know what everyone will say. They'll say I'm making it up. They'll say I was asking for it. They'll say-"

"It doesn't matter what they'll say," Auggie cut in. "It's a crime, and it's a horrible thing that happened to you, and you need help."

"You can't tell anyone," Riley whispered helplessly, her voice empty.

Auggie watched her. "I won't because it's not my story to tell." He got up to pull the bathrobe from the hook on the door. "But I think you should." He handed it to Riley.

Riley stared down at it in her hands.

"If you're not going to get a rape kit," Auggie said, "though I think you should, you should shower. Even if it's just so you can go to sleep without smelling like alcohol."

Riley stayed in bed for six days. Auggie, her savior, told their parents that she had the flu, and that he would take care of his sister, which their parents thought was sweet.

She picked at the food her brother brought her, and always ended up turning back over and pressing her face to the wall that her bed was pushed against. Her comforter covered her head most of the time, and her body was cramped from staying in the curled position, but she didn't care enough to move.

All she wanted to do was stop existing.

She ignored her best friend's calls, and she ignored her boyfriend's calls.

But she was stupid to think that that meant they wouldn't hear some story.

"You cheated on Lucas?!" Maya asked, anger in every word, immediately after Riley opened her window.

She didn't answer, just stared at her best friend. Locker room talk, must have spread like a wildfire. The most stable relationship at school broke down because one of them slept with someone else. Why wouldn't that kind of gossip be interesting?

"What kind of person cheats on someone else?" Maya asked furiously. "He's my friend, Riley, you hurt him bad."

"I was your friend first," Riley reminded her in a whisper, holding so tightly onto the seat of the bay window that her knuckles turned white.

"You were the one who cheated on him, so between the two of my friends, I'm going with the one who's not a horrible person," Maya spat at her.

Riley's mind shut down, numbness setting in. Walls grew around her, she could feel them layering up with every moment of this conversation.

"Okay."

Maya's eyebrows slanted down. "Okay? That's all you have to say for yourself?!"

Riley was emotionless now, and it only made her best friend angrier. But being numb was protecting her, and that was all she was trying to do now. Survive.

"There's nothing I can say to change this, is there?" Riley asked, and Maya shook her head disbelievingly.

"I don't even know who you are, Riley," she stated icily, and Riley nodded slowly.

"I guess not."

Maya had been her best friend. She had known her almost her whole life, known everything about her. She was supposed to be the one person that would know her.

Riley knew that there was nothing she could have said to her that would change what had happened. Maybe, yes, if she had told Maya she was raped, she would have changed her mind. But before even hearing her side of the story, she had decided that Riley was a horrible person.

And why wouldn't she?

Riley had ignored her for a week, hadn't picked up her calls or talked to her at all. She'd been a terrible friend to her.

So what was the point in telling her, anyways? She'd already made it clear, that she would automatically believe that the person she had known almost her whole life was the kind of person to cheat on someone. It didn't take much for all that history between the two of them to not matter at all.

So if Maya didn't want to be her friend anymore, Riley didn't much care.

Her walls were building higher and higher, thicker and thicker, and the more people she shut out, the safer she would be from ever going through this again.

It was just three weeks after, that she took a test and found out she was pregnant. She should have known sooner, but she was too preoccupied to notice that she hadn't had a period.

What she didn't expect, was to find out that she wasn't three weeks pregnant.

She was eight weeks pregnant.

She was waiting outside the classroom when he came out, and his expression soured when he saw her. She knew all the other kids around them were staring, whispering, but she needed to do this anyways. "I need a ride downtown."

Lucas snorted, looking down the hall where his other friends had one. "Sorry, I've got a thing."

Riley shook her head, speaking quietly in an attempt not to broadcast anything else over the school. "Well can we at least talk, privately?"

He frowned at her, shaking his own head. "I'm busy. And we're not friends anymore, remember? You made that clear when you decided to become a slut."

She watched as he walked away, her eyes going out of focus. He'd been her boyfriend for almost two years, and now he was a stranger.

Worse than a stranger. He hated her.

She took a bus downtown, signed the paperwork, and entered the procedure room, alone.

"I heard she had an abortion…"

"She cheated on her boyfriend and had an abortion? Damn, she is a slut…"

"I can't believe we were friends with her." That was Farkle.

"I can't believe she got pregnant after sleeping with someone else, and then had an abortion." That was Zay.

"Well I can't believe that she used to be my best friend," Maya stated coldly, and Riley stared at the ground unseeingly from where she could overhear the conversation her old friends were having. "Best friends tell each other everything. She didn't tell me she cheated on her boyfriend, and she didn't tell me she was pregnant, and she didn't tell me she got an abortion. Obviously we were not the kind of friends I thought we were, and she wasn't the person I thought she was."

"They're saying you had an abortion," Auggie told her, as if Riley didn't know. "Did you?"

Riley nodded, staring at the wall ahead of her, knowing Auggie could see how she was fading away, shutting people out.

"It's understandable to not want to carry the child of a rapist," Auggie consoled, kneeling down in front of her to meet her gaze.

Riley stared through her as if she was smoke, and whispered, "But it wasn't his, Auggie."

He found her two days later, and Riley knew that her brother had finally broken his silence with Riley's secrets.

"Why didn't you tell me the baby was mine?" Lucas demanded, stepping in front of her to block her path.

Riley stepped back, hugging her arms around her body. Thinking about keeping silent, just ignoring him until he went away, but deciding against it. "Because when I tried, you called me a slut."

Lucas's mouth fell open, obviously remembering the conversation she was talking about. "You should have told me before you did it. We were together for a year and a half!"

"And then I slept with someone else," she took a breath, "and you decided that I wasn't worth your time anymore." She shook her head and looked down. "I don't blame you. I don't blame Maya either, for hating me, not wanting me in her life. I guess I was a terrible friend and a terrible girlfriend, and no one deserves that in their life." She shrugged, not raising her face so he didn't have to see her trembling lip or the tears in her eyes. "Neither of you want me in your lives, and everyone else hates me because they heard your side of the story. So I'm alone, and that's fine. It's just something I have to get used to again." She turned quickly, walking away before he could grab her to stay, forcing her shoulders not to shake as tears streamed down her face.

"Riley, wait!"

'I'm alone.'

Her walls were too high and too thick for anything anyone said to matter, and that was how she wanted it to be. If nothing mattered, nothing could hurt her.

Auggie had known Maya his whole life too, and when he heard what Maya had said to her, Riley knew he wasn't going to keep silent anymore.

She was walking through the hall, the world muted around her as she pushed through the water it felt like she was drowning in. Nothing could touch her anymore. Nothing mattered.

The longer she went, the further she withdrew from her life. After all, she had no friends to ground her. No reason to speak. No reason to be part of the world except to do the bare minimum of walking between classes and eating something.

She was alone, in her box, in her bubble. People around her meant nothing as she walked by. She couldn't hear them. She didn't see them. Her walls were too thick, and too high. Nothing could break them, not even the girl who was supposed to be her best friend.

The only thing that even made her notice her, was when Maya grabbed her arm, and Riley turned, startled as Maya pulled her into her arms for a hug.

Riley pulled back, away, and saw the tears running down Maya's face. She tried to hear what Maya was saying through the water and the walls, but she was still numb to it all.

"Auggie told me," Maya was saying, the tears catching in her mouth as she hiccuped, and Riley remembered when she had last felt something.

The last emotion she had felt was the one that Maya was feeling right now, but that was weeks ago. She was too far gone.

"Why didn't you tell me you were raped, Riley?" Maya was still crying, reaching for her, but Riley stepped out of her grasp. "It changes everything, it's not your fault then! I would have been there for you!"

Riley forced her mouth open, the words escaping cracked from her disused voice. "You decided I was a slut before you heard the truth." She backed away further, putting more distance between them. "You said you didn't want to be friends."

"I didn't know!"

"And this is me agreeing," Riley forced out. "We're not friends. Don't talk to me."

Nothing around her could touch her.

Even if she had believed Maya really felt bad, Riley didn't want to be friends anymore. She didn't want to have any friends anymore. She didn't want to go through this again.

The best way to not lose your friends is to not have any friends at all.

Her old friends tried to find her, corner her, talk to her, apologize to her, but she ignored them. If they talked, she didn't answer. If they blocked her path, she stared at the ground silently and waited for them to leave. And they always did, eventually.

Riley was protected by her walls and nothing could get through them. She faded away until she couldn't even recognize herself, and she didn't even care.

Having friends is a shovel digging your way to a grave of pain.

And she wouldn't let herself go through that again.

A/N: Auggie is only two years younger than Riley and Maya in this story. A bunch of characters are OOC, I know. I think this is just gonna stay a oneshot, unless I totally rewrite it into a full story.

Please review! Any feedback is welcome :)

Kisses,

C