"Why don't you girls stay for dinner?" Matt offered like a gracious host, glancing over at Jesse for the OK nodd, summer sun waving on and off his face like waves rolling onto a sandy shore. Jesse offered to feed the whole gang tonight. No one knew why.

"Cool," Celeste replied, sliding from behind the table and prancing over to Jesse, Jesse's eyes hard against the difficult task of cooking macaroni. "Who's cooking?"

"I am," Jesse informed her, dropping a bag of ziti into a boiling silver pot of water, pride glimmering on his face as the ziti bounced around in the turbulent sea like weightless booeys.

"Then, no thanks," Jessa declined with a devious smirk, wrapping her arm around Greg as Jesse pouted in sadness, his loose red T-Shirt mimicing his downcasted spirit.

"But seriously," Ashley comforted him from the table, her fingers drawing large circles like on a large piece of paper, "We're going out tonight. To one of those classic Texan grill places in town."

"You'll definately need these," Chris advised them with an ill smile, tossing Ashley a roll of Tums from his position on their black couch, Chris's stomach churning like he swallowed hot coals that day.

"We better head out then, girls," Jessa said with regret as she glanced down at the silver Gucci watch clasped to her left wrist. "I wanna get there before dark."

Ashley and Jessa scooted out from behind the table with ease and stood beside Celeste, Celeste peeking out their tour bus's door to see Taryn leaning against the bus and sucking on a cigarette as if it was a lollipop, her hands still tremoring like they were the other night.

The boys were totally in the dark about what happened between the girls and Taryn. They were sure Taryn would bite their heads off, if they were feeling lucky. Besides, personal life should stay personal as the boys live by that rule. As far as the girls were concerned as they became closer and closer to them, the less the boys knew, the better it would be...for all of them.

"Enjoy your pasta, boys," Jessa smiled, leaning down to leave a quick kiss on Greg's lips, his lips tasting as scrumptious as chocolate, her brain fusing into the intention of not pulling away. Ashley and Celeste grabbed Jessa by each arm, the stomachs overtaking their mind's abilities, and yanked her lips from his, Jessa brushing her well-filed nails gingerly against his cheek before scampering unwillingly off the bus, giggles all that remaining of them on the bus...and the smell of CK1.

Greg watched them exit with lingering eyes, his lips permanently turned toward the sinking sun as Matt, Jesse and Chris gazed at him in awe, their little Greggy falling head over heels and Greg oblivious to admitting it. Greg slowly diffused out of his daze, the three of them still locking their eyes on his face like in transes. "What?" Greg shouted innocently, his cheeks darkening as Jesse returned his attention to the pasta...

"You ready?" Jessa asked Taryn flatly, Taryn smothering the cigarette out on the bottom of her black platform sandals, sniffing and whiping her nose as if she was a crack addict as the sun drooped lower behind the naked horizon.

"Yeah," Taryn muttered, the tension between her, Jessa and Taryn easily visable through the haze floating into the sky on this deathly hot night.

"Can we go back to the RV?" Ashley asked quietly, shivering awkwardly against the heat surrounding her like a giant heating pad. "I need a sweatshirt."

"Are you kidding?" Taryn asked, her voice ripe with attitude, all of them standing on a cloaked version of the surface of the sun before taking a deep breath in remembrance of what her and Ashley talked about in the bathroom. And Taryn did remember. "I mean...here, just use mine." She unwrapped her red hoodie from her waist and handed it to Ashley, Jessa and Celeste displaying surprisingly pleased smiles on their sunburned faces.

"Thanks," Ashley responded appreciatedly, swimming in the hoodie like in a sea of blood as the 4 of them headed out toward the lights twinkling scantly against the darkening night in the distance. If only Taryn wasn't generous that one time, they wouldn't have lost the things they loved the most.........

"That food was...incredable," Jessa exclaimed a few hours later oin the trip back to their bumble abode, weariness cloaking her eyes against the black night, her stomach engorged to the point of combustion.

"But Chris was sure right about the food here," Ashley moaned in regret of her slovenly eating habits, chewing down two chalky Tums and swallowing.

In the dusky night, Celeste reached for the RV's white door and opened it swiftly, confusion shrouding her face. "Who left the door unlocked?"

"What does it matter?" Taryn responded in a rush, her bowels demanding immediate bathroom attention, hustling past Celeste and switching on the light, "It's not like we would have...." Her voice lingered into the muffled air as the rest of them piled in, horror and misbelief splashing on their faces and halting them dead in their tracks at they looked upon the wreckage.

Even more plates and mugs scattered about the floor like unkempt toys and pieces of broken puzzles. The four of them slowly walked in further as if fearing one wrong step would cause the whole RV to explode like a time bomb. Every angle they glanced in surged grief and anger through their bodies, the sheets from their beds ripped from the mattress and spewed on the floor, their bags and privacy riffled through and discarded anywhere the culprits felt right, making the girls look like lazy slobs, making the girls look like fools. Red and blue tank tops clashed with yellow and orange baby tees, jeans meshed with shorts, bras interlaces with panties, all items mustered in a sick and conglomerated soup of misery. Taryn's black journal layed atop her and Ashley's pile of thumbed-through clothes, pages viciously torn from its binding and at Taryn's fairly beating heart. A few blocks of unmasked wood signafied a few of Ashley's photographs were hidden deep in between shirts and underwear like needles in haystacks. It looked like a vicious tornado rammed through the tiny RV with gusty wind and tearing potency, turning their whole life and pleasent situation inside out and upside down. It made them sick.

"Where's the money?" Jessa asked as smoothly as possible, though her body was ready to scream without control and fall apart at the seams. "Celeste!" Jessa sprinted to what once was her made bed, kneeling on top of the mattress and ravaging through her black duffle bag in a ferenzic panic, "Where is it?"

"We put it back in the bank after the windshield was fixed," Celeste responded breathlessly with tears crawling down her face and onto her lips, blocking any premature sobs with her hands as Ashley and Taryn walked laggardly over their fallen property lives. Their lives, their liberties were cut open and poked through with a scaple, before prime cuts of interest were yaked out by unlawful hands.

"Who left the door unlocked?" Ashley asked innocently, her eyes glazed over, her hands lifting up her ejected pink tank top from the top of the pile and peering at it as if it weren't her own.

"What difference does it make?" Taryn demanded, searching through the mounds of clothes as if searching for dead bodies, her face filling with fright, her CDs no where to be found. "Look to see if anything is missing."

"You think they just went through our belongings for kicks?" Celeste asked irate, her curls snapping like whips against her neck, Jessa shooting Celeste a cautioned glare from their disheveled bed, knowing an eruption of resentment would not make this go any less painless.

"Just look," Jessa's muffled voice called past the upset lodging like a chicken bone in her throat, biting down hard on her lips to subside the tears stabbing her eyes. Celeste couldn't discover her sneakers, her one and only wholesome way to escape Taryn when needed. Some vivacious energy like adrenaline tried to push back the sorrow tugging down on her cheeks, but she couldn't stop it. Ashley gazed at the outlet by the bathroom where her CD player was plugged securely into hours before. She stood there, her hands clasped together in a moment of silence, a tear slicing against her lurid cheek like a sharp knife. Jessa plopped down on the overhang bed, her eyes staring without sight into her silver jewlery box, not one piece of silver decorating the bottom as the box is usually useful for. She sniffed anguish back into her throat, her throat swimming in water as she kissed her left ring finger, her grandmother's wedding band safe against her skin and her prize and reward still in reachable view.

After a few minutes, they congregated at the table, Taryn swiping a black tank top and Celeste's corderoy jacket off the table with the strenght of a thousand men, her nose fumbing like a bull, her lips taunt as if she tasted something sickenly sour.

"This did not happen," Jessa cried softly, liquid spurging from her eyes as she raked at them with her hands, the air floating around them strangling them, supressing them, killing them deep.

"Well, it did," Celeste differentiated, her eyes avoiding the ocean of clothes saturdating the floor to cancel any more tears.

"They took my CDs!" Taryn shouted unhinged, her voice shaking the whole RV like a bomb exploded next door, the bomb trying valiantly to compete with Taryn's blaring voice. Her hands were a ghastly white, her fingers constricting against her palms, leaving deep grooves of fingernail imprints in her pams, her head quivering, loose from control. "Why don't they just slit my throat?"

"Please, Taryn," Ashley begged, that comment not appropriate toward the others' feelings bottled up inside and Celeste's past, touching Taryn's arm, her arm scolding her fingertips with unocular fever blisters as if Ashley had contact with a stovetop.

"They stole my sneakers," Celeste announced, the words sounding bizzare off her tounge, shaking her head as she levetated it toward the tabletop, "What the hell would they want with old, worn-in sneakers?"

"Easily replacable," Taryn muttered under her breath, Celeste's companionship to a smelly pair of sneakers inconsequential to Taryn's loss of her life, her devotion, her therapy, her CDs.

Celeste perked her head up instantaneously, her eyes jabbing into Taryn with vexed feeling. "If you weren't human and didn't give her..." Celeste accused Taryn with a trembling index finger and a roaring wave of anger before Jessa cut her off.

"We need to decide what to do next," Jessa insisted, her brows hovering over her green eyes, her voice screaming over Celeste's, switching glares rich with authority between the two, salt remains of her sorrow glittering in the dim light.

"Police. Now," Taryn commanded in a vicious voice, pounding her fist against the table, the table shivering like a chilling blow from God Himself.

"Are you crazy?!" Celeste challenged, slapping the palms of her hands against the table and jumping up like a frog at that stupid suggestion.

"Maybe you can survive without your damn sneakers, but I might as well wither away like a dying rose without my CDs," Taryn retorted, obviously pissed, leaning closer to Celeste for easier access if Celeste needed some sense knocked into her, the two sets lashes almost beating in conjuction. All 3 girls peered at Taryn with emotionless faces, their minds unclear of what should be done, Taryn's mouth gaping down in shock. "I can't believe you guys. Do you hear what your silence is suggesting? Letting these assholes getting away with this? You're the crazy ones!"

During a time of normalcy, Tary would get the A for the day. This wasn't a normal day.

"She's right," Jessa sided with Celeste, inside shunning away from Taryn's poisonious retaliation, reaching across the table to simmer Celeste down with her touch, Taryn glaring at Jessa, a betrayed look sprawled across her face as Jessa glided from behind the table, taking the podium, leaning slightly inclined as her brain began to retain normal thinking functions in the cloudiness of the invasion. "I mean, if we go to the police, we'd have to give them personal information, right?"

"Yes," Taryn replied impatiently, lodging her arms against her chest like tight ropes as she shifted her weight from one foot to another.

"They'd most likely call our parents because we're mostly minors," Jessa persisted, lights clicking above Celeste and Ashley's malfuctioning brains, not enough watts or convincing evidence sparking Taryn's light buld. Going home this early would leave Taryn and Ashley with undeserving sympathy and uprooted anger between them and their parents, and unstoppable ridicule from Jessa's mother and brother. Celeste would probably be locked in the basement until she graduated if she called Daddy Dearest and told him their RV was trashed and her sneakers, as petty as a loss that may have been compared to the possible endangerment of her afety, were stolen. It was the principle of it all. "That's it," Jessa continued, raising her arms and slicing them in a "X" through the silented air like how an umpire would call an out in baseball. "The summer would be over."

"To me, it already is," Taryn responded maliciously, each one of her words soaked and coated in venom, the events of the past few weeks colliding and playing back in her brain like a rewind button was triggered and kept playing in a broken manner, every re-play causing her to become more angry and destructive. Taryn grappled for her black Sum 41 black hoodie thusted from her duffle bag to the couch and thundering out the door into the darkness, stars the only light sprinkling down on her as she took a few large steps from the RV and ripped a cigarette out of her pack of Cambridge's secure in her jeans' pocket. Puffing on it rapidly, her toes tapped nervously, her willingness to admit her faults of the summer and her willingness to change taken from her and ripped into to tiny pieces, pieces that blocked her from Jessa and Celeste and hindered the ability to fully mend their broken relationship. She scowled at the cigarette, the burning edge deflecting flecks of addition and weakness toward her eyes, laughing at her stupidity. She took one last drag and chucked that bad boy into the dusty parking lot, the flamed end a tiny red shimmer against's evil's dark air, a final seal on her decision to turn for the better...

Taryn's other three commrades sat in the dense sense of betrayal, of invasion of privacy, of degrading fingers probing through their personal belongings. Under normal circumstances, calling the police would be the first item of their list of things to do to fix what had been broken. But this wasn't normal. This wasn't a normal trip or day.

"We can't go to the police," Jessa's voice finally sneaked through the thick curtain of stillness, her eyes deflected to the clean table top, her dainty fingernails scratching at her knuckles in a habit impling thinking, "no matter how much was taken..."

"Or broken," Celeste continued unwillingly, the thoughts making her eyes squint with disgust.

"No matter how much we were violated," Ashley agreed hushly, all three of their heads bowed toward the center of the table as if in prayer for desperate times, everything a blur of nothingness around them for those few moments of serenity.

"We just can't," Jessa concluded, the words sounding as painful as screeches of the dying in battle against their ears, the words pounding as hard at their common sense as an iron hammer, the words cutting as deep as Celeste's swipes at her wrist for personal salvation. Silently, contray to what Taryn would argue, they all admitted personal liberties overshot material belongings, things that could eventually be replaced or found in future times. If they lost their liberties, someone might as well ship them off to Antartica so at least they could freeze to their grave without being told what to do for the rest of their teenage and possibly young adult life. Freedom was what this trip was based on. Freedom is how it would end.

"C'Mon girls," Jessa's frown hurtfully revolving into an unstable, quaking simulance of a smile, "Let's clean up."