Keep You Forever ✓ | AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE AS A PAPERBACK/EBOOK! [Sample]

Prologue

                        *****************

"Okay." The word leaves my mouth before I can think this through. Actually, all this is far from okay to me. Beside me on the couch, my mother and father exchange uneasy glances before mom focuses her eyes back on me. 

"Lissa, sweetie, I know we are asking for too much. You haven't been to Juniper Hills once."

That is true. "I'm sure it'll be great," I try to smile, but my throat feels choked and raspy. How exactly I landed in this situation, I have no idea.

My parents have just told me that their eighteen year old marriage is crumbling, and to save it, they want to take a six month long cruise across seven oceans. A little backstory, though. My parents met when my Indian father decided to study law at Harvard University—where my mother (who is from Juniper Hills) was also pursuing law. Enter cliché college romance. Now back to the cruise story, please. All their vacation planning sounded just great until I realised the second half of it: It was a cruise without me.

Their harmless earlier plans to leave me with my best friend Nora's family next door stand tanked as Nora's cousins and grandparents have suddenly come to visit, so they currently have a full house. After that, the only last minute option they have left is Uncle James and Aunt Alexa, who live hundreds of kilometres away in my mother's hometown aka a hillside place called Juniper Hills. I've never met them, majorly because my mother isn't too close with her brother. We don't have lots of family. 

But desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

I push my dark brown hair away from my eyes and fix my gaze at the two people in the room with me. Mummy has short blonde hair and is petite, with a sweet childish face and blue eyes. Papa, who is slightly darker and taller than her looks more like me with his dark hair and soft brown eyes. My lawyer parents look tired, stressed and to an extent...guilty. I don't want them to. In sixteen years of my being, they've done every small thing they could to keep me happy. 

Photography? Allowed. 

Buying a thousand dollar camera? Allowed. 

Following my passion? Allowed.

Can't I do the same to save their marriage and happiness?

It's a no-brainer.

Even if it means packing up and going away to live with a family I don't know, to a place I don't know, and attend junior year at a high school I don't know with people I don't know. Sounds like a plan. I gulp and give my parents my most convincing smile, at which they sigh in unison. "I'm okay with moving," I repeat.

"Let's call James and Alexa, then." Papa says, defeated. They know I'm stubborn like that. I won't let them fall apart because of me. 

Mummy comes back a few minutes later, her bob cut blonde hair shining in the sunlight trickling through the window, and smiles weakly at me. "They say they'll be happy to have you." 

And like that, it's settled.

Six months. Six months without the only people I've ever known, ten thousand miles away from the only life I've ever known. This certainly isn't what I'd meant by summer adventure. Besides, summer is over in a week. Which means I'll be gone by the day after tomorrow. 

Tears prick the corners of my eyes, but as I glance at my parents once again, I realise that this decision might not end up to be so bad. How different could Juniper Hills be from home?

Hint : very. 

Post exchanging parting greetings with my parents (already), I lie on my bed, curiously scouring the internet for images of the mysterious place I'm soon about to become a resident of. Juniper Hills, it seems, is drastically different from Spring Park. Unlike the developed city like features, tall buildings and high speed life here at Spring Park, Juniper Hills is a quaint town in the middle of two green hills, laden with lush forests and a scenic lake.

 Wow, this place. It's like heaven, only more real.

 And I'm about to see it in two days.

The photographer in me is excited to be there now. Photos have been my way of looking at the world since ages, and behind a camera is where I feel most alive. Capturing moments with my trusted black camera is something I absolutely love doing, any second of anyday.

My phone chimes with a text. Then another. And another. On our bestie chat group 'The Plastics', my best friends Nora and Susan are responding to my "moving to Juniper Hills" text. My heart sinks as I look at their familiar faces, because know I've been hasty and emotional in taking this decision. Abandoning our plans of starting eleventh grade at Park High together, watching the next season of our favourite show together, going for school trips together, meeting boys together; I'm moving. 

Moving.

I exhale tensely as I also realise something else. I'm not going away forever. I'm going to be back in six months, because home will always be here. With Mummy, with Papa, with Nora and Susan. This is where I belong. Here, with the people who know me.

Making home elsewhere is going to take forever.