**DISCLAIMER:
All characters in this story are over 18 and purely creations of fiction. This is meant to be a fun story with only a loose connection to real life. This is meant to be read for enjoyment, so hopefully you have some fun reading it. Thanks!**
My first year in college had been a welcome change after the disastrous period of time that had been my senior year of high school. On top of all the usual pressure of getting good grades and applying to universities, and not to mention the horrible anxiety of navigating the high school social scene, my family was torn apart when my parents went through an incredibly messy divorce. It certainly didn't help that while that process was still going on my dad found someone new and was remarried while the ink on my parents' divorce papers was still wet. So when it came time to find somewhere to get my bachelor's degree I happily chose a college that was far enough away that I could fully leave all that mess behind me and focus on what my life might become.
Still, a school year only lasts so long and eventually I was forced to say goodbye to the relative serenity of campus life and return towards the inevitable chaos of the place I had once called home. My mom had moved away and almost completely stopped communicating with my father and I, and all we knew was that she was seeking her own new life. So therefore I was stuck spending my summer in a house with my dad and the new family that he was building with his new wife. For several reasons I tried to keep myself out of the house as much as possible.
My dad did not seem to mind that I was avoiding him and his wife, and thankfully he never tried to press the issue or make it any harder for me to live my own life. His work kept him busy enough that I rarely even really saw him. His wife barely ever spoke to me, which I was perfectly fine with. And so the only real obstacle and the source of all my troubles that I encountered in trying to keep the summer quiet and peaceful was Riley.
Riley was the daughter of my father's new wife, but I had known her far longer than just when her mother had started a relationship with my dad. We had been classmates since middle school, and she had been the bane of my school experience from the very start. I had always been a nerdy and shy student, whereas Riley had always been outgoing and popular. Her social standing and popularity only increased as she developed extremely good looks. Our social circles rarely overlapped, but that didn't mean we did not interact much. Riley often went out of her way to bully me for any reason she could come up with, and pulled other students that were in her orbit into doing the same. I had been quite a small and puny kid, while she had hit her growth spurt early and had been very athletic. Early on she had used her strength and that of others to instill in me a strong fear of her wrath, and I was ever careful to avoid upsetting her. Why she focused on me as the prime target of her harassment I never knew, but during all our schooling it never ceased, even during the last few months of our senior year when our parents got together. In fact during that time her bullying even increased, making those months truly miserable.
So Riley was my main reason for trying to avoid spending any time at all at my home. Doing anything at the house was especially difficult since Riley had spent the whole time I was at college entrenching herself into my family home. She had only barely gotten good enough grades to graduate, and had no hope of getting into any college at all. Her athletic record had gotten the interest of a few college programs, but she had blown them all off. So she had stayed home that year and used the time to transform the home I had grown up in into her own space. Riley and her mother had redecorated the entire place, getting rid of almost everything and either bringing in their own things or buying completely new furniture and decor. They had taken over the entire house, leaving not a single room unchanged except my room. I felt a stranger in my own place, especially with how freely Riley used all the public spaces.
And the unfamiliarity and new looks weren't the only issues in spending time in the house. While Riley did not have any aspirations for higher education, she did have fantasies of becoming famous. In fact becoming someone of influence and fame was her dream, a dream she strived for regardless of what that might cost her or those around her. She spent much of her days attempting to gather a following online so that she could become an influencer. She tried many different ways of achieving this, all of them disruptive to anyone trying to mind their own business. Her cooking videos always took over the entire kitchen and left it a disaster zone, and she refused to do her workout streams anywhere but the middle of the living room. The loud music and sounds of her gaming live streams could be heard throughout the entire house, and there was nowhere safe when she decided to do a lifestyle vlog. She set up photoshoots whenever and wherever she wished, blocking off major portions of the house for her exclusive use. None of her attempts were successful at all, as there were more than enough empty headed pretty girls on the internet already. This only made her try harder though, and some of her ploys to get more viewers had been crazy enough that she had been banned from all of the more popular sites and she was forced to use more strange platforms that had less rules.
Because of all of this I tried to spend as much time as possible out of the home, but that wasn't easy. I had failed to find a job for the summer break so I had little money to spend on doing anything, and a lack of friends in town didn't give me much opportunity to just chill somewhere else. Working out was about the only thing I had to do, since a gym membership was the one thing my father was willing to pay for. While he had more than enough money left over from the divorce, he was very hesitant to give me any. I had already started to workout quite a bit during my first year of college, so making my fitness routine even more intense and spending loads of time at the gym wasn't too hard. I had finally hit my growth spurt during that first year of college, and my gains from the gym had remarkably transformed my body. I didn't show off my new physique very much though, and often hid under very baggy clothes.
On one particular Monday afternoon I finished a long morning at the gym and begrudgingly headed home, hoping and praying that perhaps for once it might be a quiet day that would go by fast and simply. I walked from the gym to our house, which was a longish walk but I didn't mind it at all. Even carrying my gym bag I crossed the distance swiftly. Once I got to the house and saw that there were no cars in the driveway I knew both my dad and his wife were out of the house, and I crossed my fingers that one of them had taken Riley along with them.
