AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Twenty-One
Noah hadn’t meant to fall asleep at like nine o’clock, but he had. His bed was ok—better than the old one he’d had that had a spring that poked him every night. This one was like foam or something.
He laid in his bed, the baseball pillow squished beneath him, and tried to figure out what he was going to do next. He’d checked on Nova a few times in the night. She hadn’t been awake at all.
He didn’t know what else he was supposed to do. It was his job to take care of her, but he could hear her in the kitchen now talking.
She had to be talking to Nick. Her new dad.
Not his.
Noah didn’t know where his own dad was. He hadn’t ever met him. For a moment, he wondered if his mom had kept him a secret from his dad and just lied when she said his dad had died in a car wreck when he’d been three.
Maybe those pictures she’d shown him before hadn’t even been his dad at all.
She’d lied to Nick about Nova. What else did she lie about?
It was hard not to be mad at her. You weren’t supposed to be mad at dead people, he didn’t think. But he was.
If she hadn’t taken drugs, she wouldn’t be dead and he wouldn’t be here.
Noah flung his stupid baseball pillow at the wall.
It barely made a sound. Not like it would if it had been a real baseball or something.
He’d never played real baseball, except a few times with a plastic bat and ball in PE.
The sun was shining in his window. The guy hadn’t put up any curtains, just stupid cheap window blinds.
The house smelled like food. Like bacon or something. Not the microwave kind his mom had sometimes bought him, either. It didn’t smell like toast.
For which he was thankful. He hated toast. Sometimes all he would have to feed his sister for days would be a loaf of bread and a jar of jelly. Sometimes his mom would give him three dollars and send him to the store to get it.
Nova…ate toast all the time.
Sometimes Noah couldn’t even make himself. It was just…
So gross.
He wanted to see his little sister.
Make sure nothing had changed since last night.
And he was hungry. So hungry he felt like his stomach was going to destroy itself.
After that, well, Noah was just going to have to play it by ear. Figure this Nick guy out.
But first…he wanted to check on his little sister and this so-called dad of hers who probably was just as bad as Noah’s mom. Most of his mom’s boyfriends did drugs, too. He bet Nick did, too. He just hid it better than the rest.
No. Noah didn’t trust Nick one bit.
Nothing about the guy made sense at all.
