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“Oh, give this girl a break. I’m just excited.” She shrugged. “Camp Chance is reuniting first loves and creating second chances. One summer, a lifetime of possibilities.” She mimicked Troy, and I flopped back onto the bed, covering my eyes with my arm.
“Oh, no, you don’t, babe. I want the deets. All the gory and gritty details. Sam is evading all my best moves, so I need to live vicariously through you.”
I groaned into my forearm. Was she for real? She made my life sound like something out of a romance novel when it was anything but.
“If you want a fairy tale, then you’re talking to the wrong girl,” I said quietly, half hoping she wouldn’t hear me and would let it go for the night.
“Come on. It can’t be that bad.”
I felt movement at my side and peeked out from under my arm. Marissa had edged toward the side of my bed and was looking down at me with a pouty face.
“You can talk to me,” she said. “I promise I’m a good listener. I know you have secrets, but sometimes, it helps to share.”
Reluctantly, I shifted up on my ass and pressed back against the wall to give Marissa room to sit down next to me.
“I was put into foster care when I was twelve…” A wave of sadness crashed over me, sucking the air from my lungs.
Marissa’s eyes widened, and I saw the concern there. But she had asked, and I wanted to trust her with this—to trust someone for once in my life. Someone other than Blake or one of the numerous therapists I’d visited over the years.
“My parents died in an accident,” I blurted, needing the hardest words out of me. “I walked away with barely a scratch, but there was no one to care for me: no family, no friends, no one. I was placed in a group home. Can you imagine what that’s like?” I stared at the door, looking right past Marissa, unable to meet her sympathetic gaze.
“The Freemans were mean. The worst. To this day, I still wonder how they ended up with a foster license because it was pretty obvious from the second I stepped into their house that they hated kids. Especially broken kids like me.”
“Oh my God, Penny, I’m so sorry,” she said, squeezing my hand. “What happened?”
My eyes fluttered shut as the memories crashed into me, an unrelenting wave I couldn’t escape. But maybe sharing my story with her would help.
“Blake happened,” I whispered.
For the next twenty minutes, I unraveled our story to Marissa. Stolen moments out in No Man’s Land, the way he stood up for me at school and in the group home. How he tried to make my crappy life seem a little bit better.
And then, I told told how the messy boy with the goofy smile and bad attitude had given me the gift of hope in such a bleak situation.
I told her how Blake became my everything.
When I finished, Marissa looked on the verge of tears, and the only word to leave her mouth was, ‘star-crossed.’
“Really, Marissa? I think tragic is more fitting.”
“You would say that because you lived it, but from someone looking in, it’s the real deal. I can’t imagine how it must have felt to see him again after everything.”
Mashing my lips together, I swallowed down the lump in my throat, and gave her a listless shrug.
“Don’t do that,” she chided. “Don’t play this down. Your bond exceeded first love, Penny. From what you’ve told me, you guys saved each other in that sorry excuse for a foster home.”
“He left me, Marissa. Every time I see him, that’s the first thing I remember. Getting home that day to find him gone. Blake was my world… and he just left.”
I wasn’t sure I wouldeverget over that.
Marissa shuffled forward until she was right in front of me. Instinctively, I pressed further into the wall, but she squeezed my hand again, grounding me.
“Don’t you think that you both being here this summer could be a sign? A do-over?”
Of course, I’d considered it.
I’d done nothingbutconsider it for the last month. I knew better than to believe in second chances though.
Life was hard and cruel and full of disappointment, and opening myself up to the possibility of a second chance with Blake was too risky.
