Chapter 7: The Parking Lot

It was because she needed to feel something more solid than the ache humming under her ribs.

She was seventeen, barefoot, standing behind the gas station where her best friend, Cam, had just thrown up tequila and disappointment. The sky was purple-black and wide open, and the only light came from the blinking sign above the car wash. Everything was quiet in that hollow, eerie kind of way that made you think something was listening.

“You okay?” Cam mumbled from where he sat slumped against the dumpster.

“No,” Ione said. And then, without thinking, she reeled back and drove her fist into the stucco wall.

The pain came fast — hot, real, and clarifying. She didn’t bleed, but she hoped she would.

Cam winced. “Jesus. That’s not a solution.”

“I’m not looking for one,” she said, shaking out her hand, fingers trembling. “I just want something that feels like mine.”

He didn’t answer, and that was fine. Most people didn’t know what to do with the version of her that didn’t smile or perform or tuck herself in at the edges. Ione had always been too much. She knew this. People said it with their silences, with their side-eyes, with the slow, soft tone they used when they said her name like it was a warning.

But that night — in the fluorescent haze of a half-dead town, with knuckles stinging and mascara streaking her cheekbone — she didn’t feel like too much. She felt alive. Wild. Awake in a way school or church or forced family dinners could never deliver.

Cam eventually threw her his hoodie and said nothing when she didn’t put it on.

They walked home in silence. Their footsteps echoed on the pavement like punctuation marks she wasn’t ready to read.

The next morning, she looked at her bruised hand in the mirror and whispered something to herself she hadn’t dared say before:

“You don’t need to be quiet to be good.”

She didn’t know where it came from. Maybe her mother’s ghost. Maybe her own tired voice, finally deciding to speak up.

Either way, it was the beginning.

Not of healing.
Not of peace.
But of claiming the storm as hers — instead of something to outrun.