People have told me that I NEED TO WAKE HER UP ALREADY and I'm sorry she's not going to BUT I am thinking of adding an epilogue which is a different ending to what I am planning, but I've had this plot in my head for days, and I've had the last chapter planned out in my head for longer than that, and I just… yeah, anyway. Two endings. That's what I am saying.
High school is not the same as middle school. Everybody Audrey meets; freshman, sophomores, juniors and seniors alike, they all know who she is. And not just because of who her father is, but because she's the girl with the comatose mother and the father who refuses to believe she won't wake up. It's the rumours that get her, that make the blood boil in her veins. Cancer, heart attack, car crash, all of those she can deal with. It's the one where people believe it was her father who put her there, her father who loves her mother more than anything. And yes, okay, he has, or rather he had, a strange curiosity with murder and death and he's spent how many years following homicide detectives around, and really would it be such a big surprise if he took it a couple of steps too far? Except they don't know him. They don't know her father, or how he would go to the ends of the world to defend and protect those that he loves? They don't know about the time he knocked down her mother's apartment door to rescue her from a burning building, tackled a gun man intent on killing her, saved her from a sinking car, who went to Paris when Alexis was kidnapped with virtually nothing to go on and bought both of them back again… no, if they knew that, then they wouldn't think badly of him. Audrey doesn't lie to herself, she knows her father is not against putting a bullet in somebody, knows he has done on past occasions, but it's a last resort. He doesn't want to kill anybody. Not unless it's a character in his books.
There's one girl, Becky Simpson, who seems to have a vendetta against her. Audrey has no idea why, she's never met her before, but she seems to be the one who's spreading the rumours around. She's a junior. Beyond hallways, canteens and study hall, there is no other interaction. It's not until she's using her afternoon of free periods to visit her mother's bedtime that things start to come clear. Part of her thinks that school somehow managed to wrangle her time table so she has at least one afternoon off for hospital visits, saving the hassle of trying to duck out of school at lunch time. She's got her nose buried in a book, Great Expectations, which she has tried to read a thousand times before but just never… got it. But she needs it for English, and if she'd try and read it anywhere else she'd just get distracted. Terribly, horribly distracted. And that's when Becky herself knocks on the door.
It turns out, much to Audrey's shock and disbelief, that Becky's younger brother is in a similar state up in the paediatric ward. This time, it was a car crash, and her parents are in a similar state to Audrey's father. She tries to deflect the anger and the hurt onto somebody else, somebody who knows what it's like. There are only a few people in that school who knows about her brother, where as everybody knows about Katherine Castle. It's easy to deflect prying eyes when somebody kind of famous is there to catch them. And she's sorry, she is. She knows that none of the rumours are true, that her father would never do such a thing. And she's sorry this whole thing happened. She's sorry people love too much, that they hurt and they cry and that they're so over come with grief that they can't think rationally.
She talks to Theresa about it, about coping tactics and bullying and irrational thinking. Theresa seems to think it's a good idea for the two to become friends, an idea which Audrey originally scoffs at. Friends with the girl who has been so good at making her life at school hell? No, thank you. But then Becky's brother (she finds out his name is Michael) goes into organ failure, and after two years of being under Becky's parents finally realise that their baby boy isn't going to come back. He never was. Becky doesn't want to tell the school what happened, only tells those who knew, but it's Audrey she invites to the funeral. She says she doesn't have to, if it's a little too close to home she'll understand, but Audrey goes. Alexis helps her pick out a new dress, tells her about funerals and what will happen, how to act and dress and it all seems a bit too much for Audrey to take in. But she breathes, just like Theresa taught her, and she's okay. It'll all be okay.
She holds Becky's hand through out the entire ceremony.