No matter how much she runs, Laura is stuck in an endless loop of her past. With a transfer of school and a curly-haired boy who seems to be wherever she goes, it's a matter of time she realizes that her universe ceases at the sight of him-and runni...
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"TWINS. DIDN'T YOU JUST HAVE A SON? CALM DOWN, WOMAN."
Random, out-of-the-blue events like these did not need any more hurricanes. They were a disaster in itself, the furious kind—and yet the intellectual in me had ignited the fury and let it seep in through the shallow cracks of dawn. Because Stella Reyes was here, eyes big and bright, legs folded on the other side of my bed. And her biggest conundrum wasn't the fact that we were choosing to spend this time over to my place instead of us being at school—it was the fact that I had been too late telling her about it.
"Shut up," came Chloe's brilliant response. Of course, she was here too; they were practically attached by the hip. She tied her blonde waves behind her shoulders and huffed, in her hands a cup of coffee. "Seriously, though, I didn't expect you to bunk. That too, without informing us."
I rolled my eyes. "You did get to know, and then invited yourselves over with no regard for me. I can't believe my own mother took your side the second she saw you."
Stella picked twenty-dollars from her stack and shoved it in my face. "She gets it, unlike you. And don't blame me, I thought you were mourning and had to be by your side."
"Mourning?" The board game sprawled on the entirety of my bed—The Game of Life—shifted when I did, and two of the plastic cars toppled straight onto the floor. Chloe facepalmed, and the action was only followed by all her cash dramatically falling down with some plastic buildings. "What in the world about?"
I was trying, hard, not to find logic in everything today had already managed to bring. It was utterly futile, because it couldn't reverse all that had happened in the early hours of morning. How I'd dropped a text saying I won't be attending school, and how they'd shown up at my house fifteen minutes later. All the decisions I had made up till this exact moment, in my whole seventeen years of being, had led to this.
Which only made me think: what kind of decisions had I been making, which resulted in a board game marathon at 7 A.M?
Stella smacked my head lightly. "Thinking how you got so lucky so early in the morning? I'd visit you every morning if you say the word, babe."
"I never recall asking you for morning visits, you dumbass," I stared at her, and then moved my car piece three spaces forward. "And no one's mourning. Why are we playing this game, anyway?"
Chloe brought her knees closer to her face, and then smiled. Her eyelashes were lined thick with exhaustion, I noticed, but was only left to wonder why. "You've been distant lately, so we thought we'd hangout. Just us, though. The guys are a menace."
The words took their sweet time to register and make coherence, but the warmth that spread through my chest was reflexive and a bright, glowing thing. Had I been distant? Being too wrapped up in my own head could result in that, and I wouldn't realize. Times like these were perhaps when I needed to be anchored, brought back to the shore—but I'd let my personal sanity, a friend who was sister-like, walk away months ago. There wasn't any reason to dwell on things I had done consciously.
