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Chapter One
ARIA
The breeze trickled through the crack in the window as we drove past all the houses in the neighborhood. It was a place where I spent a lot of my time, but it wasn’t where I lived. My neighborhood was a twenty-minute drive away from this one, and definitely not as welcoming. Our apartment block was full of not-so-nice people, but it had been home for as long as I could remember.
Not much had changed in our apartment over the last seventeen years, apart from my bedroom—what had once been lilac walls with mermaid stickers was now gray, minus the stickers. There wasn’t much difference between the two colors, but it was enough to show it was no longer a little girl’s room. I’d gone through a phase when I was twelve and had wanted to paint it a deep red to match my hair, but Mom had put her foot down. Thank god for that.
“You excited?” Mom asked, her voice cutting through the pop song playing on the radio.
I blinked and turned in my seat to look at her. Her hands were gripping the steering wheel at ten and two, her short nails bare thanks to her job at the diner, and her hair was perfectly straight, not a flyaway in sight. I envied the way she could get that sleek, shiny look. My hair may have been the same deep red as hers, but it was a complete frizz ball, and nothing I ever did made it as smooth as hers.
“Yeah,” I replied, my voice small.
Our hair was the only similarity between my mom and me. We were complete opposites in every other way, but I had a feeling it was why we worked so well. Where she was the life of the party, I was awkward and antisocial. Where she hated being alone, I thrived on having no one around me.
“Senior year is upon us, hunnybun”—she raised her brow and flicked her gaze to meet mine—“and you’ll be leaving for college before I know it.”
I shuffled in my seat and stared out of the windshield as I gripped my hands in my lap. I was equal parts excited and anxious about what would happen at the end of the school year, but I didn’t want to tell Mom that. She wanted me to go off and be whatever I wanted to be, though I had no idea what that actually was. I read somewhere that you were most happiest when you loved what you did, but when I really thought about all the things I loved, not one of them could be a realistic career.
Running had been one of my saviors over the years, but I wasn’t good enough to compete. Mom had been talking about scholarships nonstop, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to apply for any of them. Running was mine—just for me. Something I did to calm my whirring thoughts. Too bad it only worked half of the time.
The silence drifted between us, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this year would be any different from last year. I’d be a senior, but that didn’t mean I’d become the popular girl or the girl people acknowledged while walking down the halls.
I pushed my shoulders back and sat up straighter as we pulled into the school parking lot. Only a couple of cars lingered, and I had a feeling it was all staff. At eight in the morning, the day before the school year was due to start, everyone was probably still asleep. Unlucky for me, Mom wanted to come with me to pick up my schedule, which meant we had to go before her shift at the diner.
The car shuddered to a stop, and I cringed as the loud engine cut out. It didn’t bother Mom one bit, though. She simply smiled at me and hooked her thumb over her shoulder as she asked, “Ready?”
I wasn’t ready. Not at all. But I nodded anyway.
I’d learned over the years that, unless you were in the mood for an epic showdown, you shouldn’t disagree with my mom. She’d go to bat for you even when you didn’t think she should, but that was one of the things I loved most about her.
We both got out of the car, and she slung her arm over my shoulders to pull me closer. Her five-feet-nine height compared to my five feet three was just another thing which set us apart.
A lump built in my throat as we walked through the lot, the gravel crunching underneath Mom’s Converse and my ballet flats. The ten steps to the light-blue double doors loomed closer, and if I hesitated, Mom didn’t mention it.
School used to be my safe haven—a place where I could immerse myself in everything possible. But the older I got, the more I dreaded coming here. Middle school was bad, but high school was plain terror. I’d learned coping techniques over the years, one of which was to try and go by unnoticed. I kept my gaze fixated to the floor, only looking up when absolutely necessary. I didn’t initiate conversation with anyone, and most importantly, I never answered students back when they called me names. It worked…most of the time.
Even though the hallway lined with gray lockers was empty, that same pit in the bottom of my stomach, the one that always appeared when I was on school grounds, was evident. My palms started to sweat, and my body screamed to pull away from my mom and turn back around, but I wasn’t a quitter.
One year.
