The second I pull up to the school and see sixteen year old Ava standing alone, I know something is wrong. Her shoulders are slumped and her face is stained with running mascara. Her hair is pushed away from her face and she keeps wiping at her eyes.
I park and open my door.
She catches sight of me walking to her and she runs to me. Her body crashes into mine and she is squeezing me like her life depends on it.
"What's wrong Ava?"
"I'll tell you when we get in the car, I just need you to get me out of here." She pulls away from me and wipes at her wide and glassy eyes again. I lead her to the car, shell shocked at the change in her happy go lucky attitude. Once the door closes behind me, I turn on the air and pull out of the school lot.
She buckles herself in and starts to cry again.
I take her to the park, a few miles away.
The car radio goes quiet and she turns to me.
"I came out today."
I look into her glassy eyes and want to cry myself. My heart is breaking because I know what she is about to say next.
"No one accepted me. They called me a dirty little whore and laughed at me." My blood is a fiery red, and it is fueled with raging adrenaline. I feel a motherly instinct wash over me and into my bloodstream.
"They are narrow minded and wrong okay? You can love whoever you want to and you get to say what you do with your life, not them. Their opinions don't matter, and now that you have let go and really become yourself, you only need to focus on being happy."
She is fiddling with her thumbs and trying not to cry again. I pull her hand onto the console and hold onto it. Her fingers are trembling with so much emotion and I can see the shattered pieces of her heart in her eyes.
"Thomas and I, we don't see you any different. We see you as a beautiful, shining young woman with a bright future ahead of her. We love you for you, and will be behind you every step of the way with more often than not suffocating support." She lets a small light fall from her once quivering lips and I breathe a sigh of relief.
"It's so nice to hear that."
"Well good, you deserve to hear nice things. Your heart is made up of pure gold, and even when melted down, gold is still gold. So let them be foolish idiots, you get to be in love."
"You're like the sister I never had, you know that?"
I'm laughing and crying and hugging her all at once. She clings onto me for dear life and I can only pray that she stays this way forever.
She's young, yet an old soul who has fallen in love with the idea of love. She's just starting to figure out who she really is, and I will be damned if anybody tries to get in the way of that.
Thomas really wasn't in this one, but I liked the idea of this chapter.
💕
