TWENTY-FOUR... my sister's keeper

                                        

                                              
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
•••
Charlie hadn't intended on losing his sister. 
If he had known the kind of things that would happen after taking her to that party at the Boneyard, he never would've taken her. Because that's where this all started, wasn't it? Ever since that night, when all hell just happened to break loose, the one night she actually agreed to come with him to a party after declining his offer so many times, everything had changed. 
Fights are pretty typical with a party, especially the ones where Pogues and Kooks are thrown into one big mixing bowl where heads are bound to butt against each other. But gunshots fired on the other hand, aren't the usual occurrences when it came to these keggers. All that was out of the ordinary had just decided to take place when Collins was there to witness it. Almost like the universe had planned it that way. 
He'd spent years trying to get her to come out of her shell; encouraging her to socialize with others by attending social gatherings, supporting her when she joined clubs because she needed the friends. It actually kind of upset him that no one seemed to see how incredible of a person she actually was like he did. He'd always just brushed it off as oblivious little high-schoolers, too blind to see a good thing when it was right in front of them. 
So imagine his surprise when it's John B and his little family of Pogues that take to his little sister as one of their own. They were nothing like who he'd thought she'd find herself involved with; aside from Pope, they weren't all straight A students, they had no interest in medicine, nor did they have any desire to go to college. They had nothing he thought would be in common with Collins, in fact, they were the exact opposite. He worried that because of that, they would be bad influences on her. 
And so far, he was right. Look at where they were at now. She'd kept secrets from him, stayed out past curfew, gotten into actual fistfights, and now he wholeheartedly believed that she'd stolen money from someone, somewhere, because there was no way a free hot tub just happened to show up at John B's dingy little fish shack of a house. 
But the biggest thing of all that Charlie never would've thought he'd ever have to worry about with his sister, was that she'd involve herself with someone who was currently wanted for the murder of a police officer. 
He saw the poster on his way home from work as cops were crawling all around town, posting them up wherever they could find a blank space where people would see it. He'd snagged the sheet of paper and read the $25,000 reward pasted under John B's name and read the rest of the information explaining the reason for his arrest. Charlie had also seen the description of what he pieced together to be Kiara Carrera's car at the bottom of the page, figuring out that they all must've been together, aiding and abetting in John B's evasion of the law.
A sense of fury washed over him as he processed what the poster meant. Those fucking kids. They'd brainwashed Collins into thinking whatever they had to offer her was friendship, but in reality, they were just sucking her into their bullshit and getting her into trouble she had no business being a part of. He'd always thought they were just a bunch of mischievous, up to no good, averagely naughty teenagers. No worse than he was when he was their age. It went against all of his expectations that they would be criminals at sixteen, nonetheless accused of murder. 
He had to find Collins. Nothing felt more important in that moment, than getting her back and taking her home, maybe even taking her away from all of this. When the ferries opened back up, they could just pack a bag and get off this Godforsaken island. Start fresh somewhere, begin a new life where they didn't have hi온라인카지노게임 lurking around every corner.