BROWN SKIN | BOOK 1

|| C H A P T E R . 7 ||

Mom hasn't called in to say she made it.

She were supposed to dial the house number or mine and use her motherly voice like what worried mothers do to check in on their children when they're out doing God knows what in the middle of the day or night.

Her sweet voice would irritate me as a hormonal average teenager who just wanted her mother to get off the phone and stop worrying about her because she was doing just fine. Maybe doing carefree and thoughtless mishaps, but you were always there to call and maybe I needed to be irritated with that because I knew you cared about me deep down.

But, she didn't call the night I arrived.

You didn't even call yesterday.

Mom never worried or cared like always. But it didn't make sense why Jewelz was apologizing for Mom's mistakes and faults I've made since— 

  —Ebonee 

"Jewelz I couldn't do it."

"Do what?"

I heavily sighed, annoyed with where this was going, "Deal with Dezirae every. Single. Time I go to dance. I rather have my ass burned on a stake and scraped to the bone then just deal with it. It's just too much and I'm not having it with her."

Jewelz fiddled with the wooden chopsticks in her hand while eating a bunch of leaves that were once again, drowning in sauce and dead but to this addition and special, scrawny cream noodles were involved. She tried understanding the way my teachers wanted to at school, but I was simply misunderstood to the fullest.

People choose to listen to the parts they want to hear in a full conversation.

"Well, maybe, if you got out of your shell and talked to people..."

"Are you listening?!" I said infuriated, "That's exactly something my mom would say. Those same exact words. Don't tell me to make friends okay?"

"But you're being so anti-social."

Jewelz tried to sum up my life like it was an equation. The missing symbols and problem made up for everything I was in my past and she all of a sudden had an "understanding" because it seems to her I never changed when I arrived here.

"I'm not being anti-social. I don't have to be you. I don't dread sitting alone at a table in a restaurant or does it ache to not talk to people all the time. I'm sick of making friends, those temporary friends, you know what they do? You can talk and laugh about pointless topics and joke around over foolish subjects but at the end of the day, you realize they're not going to be there for a long time and they stop the pointless talking and you suddenly have to face reality."

Esther came to mind. My only pale friend who I actually been friends with but that's another story.

"You're not their top priority, you're not, they won't make time with you anymore."

My cold chuckle became weary.  "It all depends where you are on their priority list."

I shook my head thinking about my ex-best friend.

"You can already guess where I was."

She swallowed the last spoonful of noodles and placed the chopsticks down.