S2 Week 12 Bonus Story: Replaced

Luna's New Best Friend

Welcome to Trainwrecks: Season 2 (2005-2006)! If you haven’t read Season 1, please start there! Trainwrecks is a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get bonus content each month that delves further into character backgrounds or expands the current narrative. This bonus content is not needed to understand the main story. Money made from paid subscriptions gets reinvested into the series in the form of art and advertising!

For series introduction, character profiles, relationship charts, and general orientation, check out the Table of Contents!

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June 2002 - January 2003

Sixteen-year-old Dimitri had experienced many great hugs in his life, but this one was easily in the top five. He stood in the entryway of the Cruz family’s house for the first time in three months, being squeezed so tightly by Sebastian that he couldn’t move his own arms to hug him back. “Don’t you ever do that again!” his best friend cried. He’d gotten a bit taller in Dimitri’s absence, as if the reality of the drug overdose had forced him to grow up both mentally and physically.

“I won’t,” Dimitri promised, feeling properly chastised for his heroin addiction and everything it had made him do and say in the past year. He hadn’t been thinking—which was the whole point of wanting to do drugs in the first place, really. But his thoughtlessness had almost taken him away from the two people who loved him most, and only in that moment when he believed he would die had he seen how truly awful such a separation would be. How ugly. How permanent.

Where was person number two anyway? He looked over the top of Sebastian’s head and spotted her standing by the stairs, one freckled hand on the rail. Luna, who had loved him her whole life, in whose eyes he could never do wrong, who’d known him longest and understood him best. He’d expected a reaction like Sebastian’s. He’d anticipated tears, had looked forward to her hug because she always gave the best hugs. A hug from her would have fixed everything, would have comforted him, would have made him feel forgiven.

But she did not hug him. She didn’t rush forward to interrogate him. She didn’t even cry. Her blue eyes, usually so full of warmth, regarded him with an animal wariness that took the physical distance between them and shoved it between their hearts.

She looked at him the way she would a stranger, like he was any other potential bully ready to cause her pain.

And then she turned and ran up the stairs.