Thankfully, mercifully, Jon's house was only a mile or so away from Sarah's, as opposed to the five miles she had traversed just to be told by her own mother to leave.
What was Sarah's life now? How had this happened?
Sarah's legs stopped walking. She had arrived at... a house. She could only assume it was Jon's. But what could she do now? Knock on the door and see if anyone was home? She certainly couldn't go back to her own home. Not now, anyway. And while her legs had been on autopilot, she hadn't quite been paying attention to where she was going. She didn't really have anywhere else to go.
So, with an exhausted sigh, Sarah walked up to the front door and knocked.
"Hi!" A young boy, around 10 years old, opened the door. Sarah paused. This might actually work.
"Hey, I'm a friend of Jon's," she informed the child. "From school. He asked me to grab something from his room, can you show me where it is?"
If anyone else had opened the door, if it had been one of Jon's parents, or his younger-but-not-that-young sister, such a direct approach wouldn't have worked. They would have asked questions. Zoe would have already known who Sarah was and rejected her on the spot.
But, ah, the innocence of youth.
Mikey Gibson literally just opened the door and guided Sarah to his brother's bedroom, then left her alone.
Sarah let the bedroom door close behind her. She was fairly certain now that Jon was not returning to this place any time soon, so who would notice or care if she stayed here for a while? At the very least just to rest her legs and get some sleep.
Sarah looked around at what she had to work with. Why were boy's rooms so disgusting? The bed itself was okay enough, but dirty clothes littered the floor. Papers all over the desk. A collection of clutter made the nightstand appear basically useless...
Sarah's thoughts stopped. Something red on the nightstand caught her eye. A gemstone? She picked it up: no, not a gemstone, just a regular stone. It was kind of pretty, though, and even if it would have paled in comparison to literally anything that was in her actual bedroom, a small stone that was even kind of pretty felt like a relief when Sarah was confronted by the rest of the bedroom that she would be using as refuge this evening.
Sarah surveyed the rest of the room once again, then returned her gaze to the red stone and sighed. "I wish everything in this room was as pretty as this stone."
