Ceci had been sitting right next to her sister when she began to hear the snickering around her, the overall whispers lifting the entire volume of the crowd at graduation. Her eyebrows furrowed together as she recognized it, her mom asked her what was going on as Ceci just shrugged, she was wondering the same thing, her attention drew to the pamphlet everyone seemed to be focusing on, it had to be the cause of all the whispers. Flipping through the she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, until she found her sister’s name towards the end, and eventually got to the words that practically choked the girl as she read them. She looked over to where her sister had been sitting right next to her and she seemed to have already be gone, her eyes moving to her mom, the tears already building. “Sabias esto?” The girl could barely get the words out, as she pointed to the portion of the page, but she saw the pain on her mom’s face the moment she read it and couldn’t even stomach sitting there in that moment. Ceci rarely expected anyone to be a good person, her expectations of people were always very low, she’d bee disappointed too many times to think highly of just about everyone. However, not for a second did she question her sister, she was the one person Ceci trusted with absolutely everything.
She’d been thrown enough by the fact that her dad was on campus and looking for her, she hadn’t actually seen him but the fact that he was there had her already on edge. “I’m leaving.” She said firmly, although she wished it was to Isa and not to her mother, who she was sure was going through her own emotions in the moment, but she couldn’t bear being strong for her in that moment. Her head began to spin as he stood up, sure she could be hurt by the fact that her father found a way and even wanted to be apart of Isa’s life now yet still never reached out to Ceci, but that was the same situation she was in when she was a child and he left, Ceci gave up expecting anything from him long ago. What hurt most was that her sister was out there building a relationship with him and didn’t so much as mention it to her.
As she walked away from the crowds of people she found a set of stairs tucked away from everyone, needing to sit down to even process what she’d been running away from. She’d wanted to do anything but cry, yet her face was wet from tears regardless, she began to wipe them away as she heard steps, not bothering to look up, “Please. Not now…”
Truthfully this had been the worst time for a family event to pop up, all Teddy ever wanted to do was show Ceci off, to his mom especially. She’d been going on and on about how excited she was to see prom pictures, and see Ceci herself at graduation that at this point he felt like a failure. Not only did his relationship crumble but now he was also disappointing his own mom. He was excited to just graduate, walk the stage and get it over with. But much like Luxor fashion, the circle had to infiltrate's. He saw the commotion, everyone arguing, getting flustered, storming off. He did what he needed to do before hopping down and grabbing one of the papers everyone seemed to be studying. He was happy to see none of the paragraphs were about him. Though, honestly his stomach dropped upon reading Isa’s secret. His eyes immediately scanning the room for Ceci. He knew she had to be hurt by this- how couldn’t she be?
He watched as Ceci darted out of the room, he stood for a moment, wondering if it was even appropriate or okay to chase her down in this moment, but despite his better judgement, his feet were already going. He lost site of her, wondering where she could’ve gone. He had a brief moment of panic. What would he even do if he did find her, nothing he said would be able to make her feel better. He looked around, unable to find her. He found himself ready to give up as he swung open one last door, leading to the stairwell. He felt relief as he heard her voice. “Yes now.” He said as he sat down beside her. “Are you okay?” He asked quietly. In this moment, none of their relationship drama mattered to him. He was willing to put that to the side to focus on her right now. He shook his head at his own question. “Of course you’re not okay. And you don’t need to be.” He said reaching his arm out to offer physical comfort if she wanted it, it was taking everything in him not to just scoop her up and comfort her how he would’ve when they were together. He wanted to offer her to run away from all of this, hide out in his room and binge Netflix.
