Chasing

The hot-pink heel of her black boot pressed against the pedal of a techno-pink Chevrolet Spark. Her shamrock-green eyes remained fixated on the road, but their focus kept switching to the steering wheel. She had not been in the driver's seat of a car for nearly a year, not since the end of the second Nonary Game. After escaping from the abandoned building, she and the other players found a truck, and she took to the wheel, chasing after June and―

She shook her head as if to shake the memories from her mind, like swishing water out of a bucket, and several hot-pink ringlets flew in her face, temporarily obscuring her vision. By the time the frizzy fringe fell out of her line of sight, she was within twenty feet of a black Jeep, stopped at a red light. Her heel pounded on the brake, and her new car jerked to an abrupt halt, stopping less than three inches from the back of the black car. If her hands had not been tightly gripping the steering wheel, her ninety-six-pound body would have rocketed into the windshield.

"That was way too close," she muttered in a stunned soprano.

Her hands were trembling uncontrollably, not only from the terrifying experience of nearly rear-ending a car but also because she almost stumbled upon a series of memories she never wanted to recall. She briefly wondered what happened to the other sister-and-brother pair who participated in both Nonary Games, who were coerced into the first but orchestrated the second. She wondered if they had forgotten about the Nonary Games, about the other players, about her. She wondered what happened to the car they used in the Nevada desert, the one driven by―

"They drove a black Jeep," she nearly gasped in realization.

Her eyes grew as wide as the two hot-pink cotton balls hanging on strings from her hooded jacket, and her body jolted forward so she could clearly see the back of the driver's head. He had blonde, almost white hair, just like―

The Jeep moved forward, and she noticed the light had turned green. Pressing her heel on the pedal, she cursed at the one-lane road that prevented her from driving beside this white-haired man. Four and a half miles later, the car turned at an auto repair shop, and she swerved into the space beside it. She watched as the door swung open, revealing―

"This is definitely not him," she exhaled in a dejected sigh.

This person had the same hair color, but the resemblances ended there: they shared no other qualities. Covering her blushing cheeks to conceal her embarrassment, she scolded herself for following a stranger's car for four and a half miles. Closing her eyelids to black out the sight of the white-haired man strolling into the building, she scolded herself for thinking he could be the same person who has been dodging the law for nearly a year. And, as she bit her lower lip bloody in a failed attempt to stop tears from forming in those closed, shamrock-green eyes, she scolded herself for chasing cars with drivers who resembled the man she fell in love with.

Author's Notes: This was another assignment for my Creative Writing class. We had to write a short-short story, told in five minutes or less, with a word count near five hundred. It's from the perspective of Clover/Yotsuba, after the second Nonary Game and shortly before the events of Good People Die―I mean, Virtue's Last Reward, and the storyline is compliant with the True Ending. I ship Clover and Santa-34, along with 56 and 78-and I think Clover views Junpei as another older brother and looks at Santa as a possible love interest until-uh, yeah, right. Uhm, that's about it, I guess, so here's the usual "constructive criticism is appreciated." (Oh, I know I owe a bunch of stories to various people―mostly Pokemon prompts that I promised to write at least a month ago―and I'll get to those soon, I promise. Keep reminding me, really, I won't get annoyed.)