last summer ✯ g.b.d.

✯ ~ ᴏɴᴇ ~ ✯

The day school ended I ran home, flew upstairs to my room and threw myself on the bed and cried and cried. I kicked my backpack around the room until it had no shape, and opened all the windows to let in the summer air the fragrance of peaches the songs of the birds the golden the blue the green the pink and all of anything and everything that was beautiful and perfect. I stood there in front of the window for a long hot second, trembling all over with mixed emotions surging up within me from places I never knew existed. In that moment, I could have cried over no one and laughed over literally nothing, because nothing mattered anymore.

I was free.

~

I was reaching for a peach when my golden rainbowed world broke into millions of shattered pieces around me. 

"Laila, honey, I have to talk to you."

"I - what, Mom?" My heart dropped to my feet, and suddenly every incident I'd ever hidden from my mom ran through my mind. I felt for my phone in my pocket and guiltily tried to ignore a memory from about two weeks ago when I'd almost crashed her car into a pole and painted up the scratches so she wouldn't notice.

"I'm engaged."

I suddenly gripped the peach with a strength unnecessary for holding peaches.

"What the hell?"

Mom looked uneasy and toyed with her keys.

"I'm engaged to Cody, the man I brought home to dinner a while back?" 

"Who?" I asked stupidly, even though I remembered a bearded Cody with a dusty beaten up car that looked like it landed out of a history book on the 1800s, a gaze that seemed to perpetually be looking at you obscenely, and a smell of cigarettes and beer that smothered anyone within a ten feet radius of him.

"You know, Cody - " and she began to repeat herself, describing him to encourage my memory. Her words fell on deaf ears, and she could have been singing the national anthem at the top of her lungs for all I cared or noticed. She was getting remarried. To a douchebag. 

My mom and I had never been extremely close, and we learned that we disagreed on almost every topic under the sun by the time I turned fourteen. Despite that, the fact remained that since my dad had abandoned us when I was three, she was all I had, and I wasn't about to lose her to a shiftless asshole. 

"Why?" I interrupted her monologue on Cody. "Why now? And why him?"

Mom shifted her weight from one leg to the other and tugged her blouse before answering. 

"I know he doesn't look much," she began, then paused, as though deciding how exactly to phrase her thoughts. "He's a really sweet man once you get to know him, and he's been through a lot of rough things. He's had a tough life, and sees life the way I do. I do think he's the one."

She went on, but I didn't care. My nails were digging into the peach now, and I knew it was going to burst. I didn't care. Something was boiling inside my chest, and I felt first strangled, then explosive. 

"Why didn't you tell me this before?!" I broke out, "Why didn't you tell me the night he proposed to you? Why are you picking him over me? Are you seriously going to go off and get married to a douchebag and forget all about me? What's wrong with yo -"

"Laila!" She began to move closer to me, as though to calm me down, but I just glared at her in rage and backed away. "Laila . . . I would never forget you. I thought he'd make a good father - "

That was the last straw. How in the living hell would he be a good father?! How could she say that when she knew, she knew  that my father was a sensitive topic for me? How could she just present me a new father like he was a new pair of shoes? I was boiling with rage, and I roughly pushed her away from me when she advanced.

"Get away from me!" I yelled, and I ran to the front door. I pushed away the whispers in my head about how I was probably overreacting and that my mom meant well - I didn't care. I shoved the door open and ran out to the sidewalk without a second glance back. I ran, and I didn't stop running until I reached the end of the block, then I was in the grove of trees by the park and I ran through half of it, my eyes blurring more and more with every step until I collapsed at the base of a tree. My chest heaved, and the lump in my throat was so big it hurt, and tears were rolling down my face, dampening my hoodie. 

I looked at my hand, and the peach was still there, smushed and the juice running over my arm to the ground. I wasn't hungry anymore. I threw it as far from me as I could, and heard it thud against a tree. My stomach turned over at the smear it left, and I turned away. It was disgusting. 

I wiped the tears from my face and pulled myself to my feet. I began to pace the grove, kicking at the fallen leaves angrily as I walked. A thousand thoughts were running through my head, none of them pleasant, and all I felt was anger, anger in my mind and pain in my heart. 

I was on my fifth round of the grove when a sound interrupted my thoughts. I immediately froze, and looked around me. When I saw nothing, I stepped closer to where I thought was the source of the sound. I heard it again, and it struck me, because it sounded like someone was sobbing - sobbing from a pain deep within, sobbing like they were broken in a way that could never be healed. I walked up to the base of a tree, and then I caught my breath, just fighting the instinct to jump back. 

A boy was huddled next to a tree with his head on his knees, his shoulders shuddering with huge sobs. He looked like he could be my age, but the pain he was experiencing looked like it would be hard to bear for even someone who had lived a long time. I watched him, and was debating on whether I should come forward and ask what was wrong or just slowly walk away when he suddenly shivered all over and raised his head, looking straight at me with a look I would never forget.

His look haunted me. He had the face and eyes of someone absolutely shattered, someone who's lost everything they ever had, and the tears running down his cheeks might as well have been tears of blood for how painful they looked. What horrified me most of all was that I recognized him, and he was the last person I would have expected to find like this.

It was my crush since eighth grade, the most sought after boy in the school, and the hottest, most laid back and carefree guy I'd ever seen, next to his twin. 

Grayson Dolan. 

~ a/n

kill me for starting off with a cliché oops lmaoo I promise it gets better! don't unsubscribe! pls! vote! comment! send me love! plS! [insert creepy emoji]

anyway I hope you enjoyed the first chapter! I have a really cute edgyish plot planned out for this book so stick around! 

~ maelynn