Nowhere Left to Run
Yaz once believed things would be okay if she could just get off Isla Nublar. She knows better now.
Chapter One: The Myth of Happy Endings
At 18, Yaz felt for a moment that she might have her life back.
It had been a struggle, these past two years post-Nublar, to pick up where she'd left off. Six months on dinosaur infested islands and a miraculous return may have made her something of a celebrity for a while and gotten her family a frankly obscene amount of money in legal settlements, but it had basically ruined the remainder of her high school experience.
The ordeal itself had eaten up the second half of her sophomore year, and a focus on recovery cut a few months into her junior year as well, meaning she had way too much catching up to do to even think about rejoining the track team right away. Even worse, her experience had made her a spectacle. Suddenly everyone was talking to her, wanting to know every detail of the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and she struggled to have a single conversation in which Nublar was not brought up.
Senior year was better, but really only because she was running track again. And even that she sometimes struggled to enjoy, when the ankle she'd sprained and never really sought proper treatment for began to throb at the end of the day and she had to push to the finish line despite it. Those days reminded her a little too much of Nublar, where she couldn't stop running no matter how much pain she was in, because to stop was to give up and meet the jaws of a hungry carnivore.
Things really started looking up the summer following graduation, because she got to spend it on an extended visit to her girlfriend in Texas.
