Page 13 of I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life

Nalini

Probably not. Just ask her about her character and let her ramble. And be glad she’s getting introduced to stats long before high school.

The Terminator

MY 10 YEAR OLD IS DOING STATISTICS FROM A MAKE BELIEVE GAME?

Nalini

Oh right. You failed that class.

Good luck.

The Terminator

She just showed me the rule book. How does a game have this many rules?

And she wants a second rulebook? Why are there more rules? How many rulebooks can one game have?

Nalini

Does it really matter if she’s having fun?

The Terminator

Good point.

I told her she had to play for a month before I'd get her any more rule books.

Apparently, she has a list.

A LIST.

She’s going to attempt to explain her character sheet. I’m getting flashbacks to failing stats again.

Wish me luck

I smiled as I put down my phone, before a new wave of strangeness washed over me. Kameron freaking out over math felt like high school again. It was easy to slip back into how things used to be, and that worried me.

I hadn’t fully forgiven him, and the wound he’d reopened had only just started healing. Even if I was the only person here Kameron considered a friend, it had to be obvious I couldn’t immediately jump back into our friendship like nothing ever happened. I missed him, but in the same breath, everything in my gut told me to stay as far away from Kameron Raine as possible. It’d taken fifteen years for him to apologize, and it wasn’t until I prompted him he’d even realized what he’d done.

If I had to do all the thinking in this friendship, I didn’t want it.

I hadn’t realized my fingers once again hovered over the typewriter until I heard the telltale clack of the keys.

It was a line. A terrible line. But a story was there — or at least, the beginnings of one. Maybe. I continued writing, letting words pour out of me for the first time in years. The more I wrote, the less like a story it was. It turned into a stream of consciousness mess that couldn’t be considered anything.

This was the breakthrough I'd been waiting for, and for the first time in my life I didn’t care if the writing was bad. It was one of the biggest reasons I'd stopped; everything I put on the page had been so insanely terrible it felt better to give up. But now? I had the hurt, the betrayal, the isolation it caused all on the page in black and white. It didn’t have to be good; it just had to be true.

For the first time, it didn’t matter, even with the knowledge that my writing was bad and directionless. It didn’t even matter this piece of paper would never see the light of day. It was the reminder I needed, that despite everything, I'd been giving too much of my energy to hating the Raine brothers and not enough to my passions. I didn’t need their permission to do what I loved — I could just do it.

And with a smile and a ding on the bell of the typewriter, I loaded in another piece of paper and finally got to work.

Chapter ten

Kameron

“Iwant to go home!” Cassidy sobbed the moment she got in the car. I hadn’t expected the hurricane of tears that swept in, not when she'd finally started to fit into the town. “I hate Briar Hill. I want to go home!”