AllFreeNovel
Share Us
From there she began to explore. Bars, restaurants, pop-ups, food trucks, street fairs. Anywhere someone was doing something cool with food she would seek it out and try it. All while simultaneously studying Constitutional Criminal Procedure and The Legal and Regulatory Environment of Business .
Snoozers…
Something was going to have to change. She knew it. She just didn’t know how she was ever going to tell her dad. He would freak. The money he’d already spent. His desire for her to be better than he was. To be a professional and not toil away in some kitchen for seventy hours a week, minimum wage, no health insurance, no 401k, back aching, heel spurs… It wasn’t as glamorous as the Food Network made it out to be. Not by a long shot.
She looked up from her laptop and around her room. Her childhood room, the one she’d grown up in. Vestiges of her youth all around her. On the walls, the floor, even the ceiling.
Her frilly bed pushed up against a pink wall with the word PRINCESS, in all caps of course, stenciled upon it. Posters of Maroon 5, Pink and Gwen Stefani still taped up on the other side. Over her white dresser with the sunflower stickers on it was a bulletin board covered with the memorabilia of her teen years.
Stickers and ribbons, a ripped ticket from her first concert. She saw No Doubt. Her and Nikki. When she was twelve. Back before Nikki lived with them. A photo of her at the beach. Another of her up in the high chair, sporting shades and twirling a whistle. Working as a lifeguard.
It was a job she’d done every summer between fifteen and nineteen. Days at the pool, nights at Cap’s. She was a busy girl growing up. Next to that was a poem she’d written in ninth grade that she was still particularly fond of. Its title was “Imagine”. It was all her, yet it all felt so not her these days.
Ant looked back down at her computer. She was tired and done for the night. She saved the file, closed the top and moved it to her nightstand. She took one last sip of her fancy ginger and meyer lemon herbal tea, and placed the cup back down.
Then, just as she turned off the light, she got a ding. It took her a moment to realize what it was. The short, tight, high pitched ding was a Facebook message. Something she almost never used. Her and her friends just texted, almost exclusively. She barely even called her best friend anymore. It was all text and never messenger.
She picked up her phone and looked at the message. It was just one word.
Hi
14
That’s all it said. Just “Hi”. Ant looked down at her phone. Her phone didn’t recognize the number so it couldn’t have been anyone she knew. It couldn’t have been any of her friends. She thought briefly about ignoring it, figuring it might just be a wrong number. That still happened occasionally, right? A wrong number? Instead she typed back.
Hi
Um… Who is this?
There was brief pause and then her phone started to react. A small speech bubble formed beneath what she’d written. Someone was writing back.
It’s me Romeo
We met a couple hours ago
I saved your life
Protected you from a hot batch of flying cheese fries…
Adrenaline shot through her body. Yeah, she was awake now. But, how??
Um… Stalk much?
Slight pause, then speech bubble, then…
Yeah, I know, right?
Couldn’t help mysel f
How?
(Guy shrugging emoji)
Turns out I’m quite the detective.
Really?
Yeah
