Chapter 12 Arctic Blue eyes
Lily's POV
I ran out of the school and kept going.
The sky was already darkening, heavy and grey, and I did not care. I just needed to move, needed the distance between me and that cafeteria to keep growing until I could not hear the laughter anymore even in my head.
I wanted to run away from all of it. From being the scholarship slut. From being the desperate girl with the sick mother. From being too fat to deserve a seat at any table in that building. From the particular cruelty of Frank's voice carrying across the cafeteria like it was nothing, like my mother's suffering was material for a joke.
Things had been almost manageable. Mia, the job, the deal, small moments of something that felt close to okay. Why did this break me so completely when other things had not?
Because I had not wanted to cry in there. I had not wanted any of them to see it, especially not Wade. I had not wanted to hand him that satisfaction after everything.
But my mother. That was the thing I could not protect.
The rain came down suddenly and heavily and I walked straight into it without slowing. The tears and the rain mixed together on my face and I let them because there was no point anymore in separating the two.
Maybe I should not have taken this job. But they would have bullied me regardless and my mother's eyes were getting worse and the bills did not stop arriving and there was no version of my life right now that did not hurt in some significant way.
I stopped walking eventually, not because I had decided to but because my body had simply had enough. I stood at the edge of the road and let the rain soak through everything, my uniform, my bag, all of it, and I tilted my face up to the dark sky like it owed me an explanation.
It had nothing to offer.
Then I felt a presence beside me. Large, quiet, unhurried. And the rain stopped falling on my face.
An umbrella had appeared over my head.
"Lily Johnson?"
I turned.
The person standing beside me was tall and broad shouldered, athletic in the way that suggested years of deliberate effort. His face was sharp and handsome and completely unfamiliar to me except for one thing.
His eyes.
Arctic blue, pale and clear even in the grey afternoon light. I knew those eyes. I had known them a long time ago on a much rounder, softer face.
He reached out gently and drew me toward him, one arm coming around my waist, and I was so exhausted and so soaked and so emptied out that I leaned into it without thinking. I could feel the steady thud of his heartbeat through his jacket and I closed my eyes and the rain drummed on the umbrella above us.
He bent his head slightly toward mine and I felt the closeness of it and my heart did something confused and I closed my eyes a little tighter.
"Don't you recognize me?" he said softly.
I opened my eyes and looked up at him properly. Those pale blue eyes looking back at me, patient and warm and familiar in a way I could not immediately place.
"You look familiar," I said slowly. "I know you from somewhere but I cannot—" I stopped. Something clicked. "Wait." I stared at him. "Ryan?"
He smiled and it rearranged his whole face into something I finally recognised underneath all the changes.
Ryan. Nine years old, round cheeked, big bellied, the boy I had walked to school with and defended in back alleys and shared snacks with on front steps. Ryan, who had cried when his family said they were moving and made me promise to remember him.
"Ryan!" I said again, louder, like saying it twice would help me believe it.
He laughed, low and easy. "In the flesh."
"How are you even—" I gestured helplessly at all of him, the height, the shoulders, the complete absence of the boy I remembered. "How did you get here? How did you find me?"
"Let us get out of the rain first," he said and steered me gently toward a covered shelter at the side of the road.
We walked and I let the memory come back fully as we moved. The last time I had seen him we were nine years old and his family was relocating. He had come to say goodbye and I had found him on the ground in the street with a group of older boys standing over him.
I had marched straight into it without thinking twice.
"Why are you dragging my friend?" I had demanded.
"Your friend?" one of them had said. "Your fat friend?"
"He is my friend!" I had said.
"Look what he has got," another one said, gesturing at Ryan's hands. He had been clutching a small block of cheese, holding it carefully away from them. "We asked for it and he said he was saving it for a special friend. Two fat beggars sharing cheese."
"We are beggars?" I had said, my voice going up before I could stop it.
"Yes because neither of you has anything worth keeping."
"We have each other," I had said, "which is more than you have. That is why you bully people. Because nobody keeps cheese for you."
The slap that followed had snapped my head sideways. I had stood back up immediately, looked at Ryan and said, "I am coming back," and run as fast as my legs would carry me to his front door.
I had arrived back with his parents within minutes and the boys had scattered.
Ryan had hugged me so tightly I could barely breathe. His mother had pressed chocolates and a block of cheese into my hands and his father had shaken my hand like I was an adult. And then they had loaded into their car and driven away and I had stood on the pavement watching until I could not see them anymore.
"Lily?" Ryan waved a hand in front of my face.
I came back. "Sorry. I was remembering."
"Me too," he said quietly.
We stood under the shelter together and I looked at him again properly. "How did you do it?" I asked.
"Do what?"
"This." I gestured at him. "You were nine years old with a round belly and the most adorable fat cheeks I had ever seen and now you are—" I stopped and looked down at myself. "This. How."
He smiled gently. "Discipline and exercise mostly. We moved somewhere with more space, more healthy food. My friends at the new school were good people. Mum and Dad were supportive." He paused. "It took time."
"I am genuinely jealous right now."
"Jealous?" He let out a soft laugh. "I can help you, Lily. If you want it. Get you to wherever you want to be."
The offer sat in the air between us, kind and uncomplicated, and I felt something move through my chest that I had not felt in a long time. Not excitement exactly. Something quieter. The feeling of being seen by someone who had known you before everything got difficult.
"How is your mother?" he asked after a moment.
The question landed softly but it landed. "Things are not going very well," I said.
"I could see something was wrong," he said. "I saw you standing out there in the rain."
"Yeah." I looked at my soaked uniform and almost laughed at how thoroughly ruined the day had been. "After I got the scholarship everything changed. I thought it would be better. It got worse."
He nodded slowly. He did not rush to fill the silence with reassurances or solutions. He just sat down on the shelter bench and looked at me and waited, the way someone waits when they actually want to hear what comes next.
I sat down beside him.
And for the first time all day I did not feel completely alone.