AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Learning how to navigate life differently has been a lot harder than I thought it’d be. I don’t want you to blame your father, Ava, I truly don’t, but I was…caught off-guard.” Mom spoke slowly, and for the first time in a long time, I could detect sadness in her voice. She usually bottled the emotion up, put on her realtor voice, but things were starting to slip through. “It’s been hard to wrap my head around it myself, to accept everything, and I didn’t even stop to think of a way to talk to you about it.”
The pain of the situation had my lungs in a vise grip, and looking at my mother now, struggling to keep her composure, caused something in me to crack. But her explanation, though it made sense, didn’t make me feel any better. Not really. The phantom pain of navigating everything on my own still hurt. “I know it would’ve been hard, but I wanted to hear it from you, not a stranger.”
“Talking with Ms. Murphy wouldn’t be a bad thing, but you’re right, I should’ve talked to you first.” She hadn’t quite looked at me yet, but that was how I knew she was affected, too. “Your father and I both should’ve talked to you about everything. We should’ve explainedwhywe decided it. I was just afraid, I suppose. Not knowing what to do, how you’d react. Talking about things before I know a concrete outcome is hard for me.”
I could understand that. I was kind of the same way, not wanting to talk about it until things were less tumultuous. It was why I hadn’t told Rachel about kissing Reed while my feelings were still in a whirlwind of chaos. It made sense to be nervous about it, but the bone-chilling fear of coming clean was more than normal. I didn’t know what her reaction would be, and the realm of not knowing was too scary for me to venture into.
“Do you wish you hadn’t gotten married so young?” It was a question that I’d always bounced around. Before, when they’d sprung the separation on me, I’d forced myself to deal with it, to bury everything down deep. Now was time that I could scratch a bit of the surface. “Do you wish you hadn’t been high school sweethearts?”
Mom looked thoughtful for a moment. “Sometimes you grow apart as you grow older, but it doesn’t mean I’d change it. Do I wish I had dated others before settling down?” She smiled a little. “I don’t. Do I wish we’d made our love more of a priority as we lived life? Do I wish we put each other before work? Yes. But I don’t regret any of it, Ava.”
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat. “I think I’d be afraid of falling in love too young.”
“Oh, don’t be afraid of it, sweetie. Don’t ever be afraid of falling in love, at any age. You know what they say—it’s better to have loved and lost.” She didn’t say it, but I filled in the rest of the quote.Than never to have loved at all.“You can’t live your life afraid of what could happen. You can’t hold yourself back from living because you’re afraid of the consequences. Love is always worth any risk. Even now, where I’m at, I believe that.”
I looked into her eyes, pressure beginning to build behind my own. She was braver than me. That was why I wasted my first kiss, why I almost kissed Josh even though I didn’t have feelings for him. I was afraid of falling in love too quickly, too young. Afraid of repeating her history.
Love is always worth any risk. I wanted so badly to believe that, but I wasn’t sure that I did.
“I’ve been struggling these past few weeks,” I told her, and though it might be tough, I knew I needed to get it all out. I couldn’t let anything sit unsaid between us anymore. “It’s got a lot to do with Rachel and school and…Reed.”
Mom didn’t react to hearing his name, but she did lean her body against her door, facing me as fully as she could. “Go ahead,” she said, patting my hand where it sat on the middle console. “And don’t leave anything out. My full attention is on you.”
Without hesitating, I told her everything. From the Most Likely To list to kissing Reed, from butting heads with Rachel to even talking about Josh. We sat in front of the house with a For Sale sign in the yard for what seemed like hours, finally pulling back the curtain and letting her know what had been on my mind. She listened to me the whole time, and even though she got a few text messages, she never even checked them. Her full attention was directed toward the passenger’s seat, toward her daughter, who shared everything for the first time, and it finally felt like how it was supposed to.
Ihad a bad feeling the second I walked into Expresso’s Café. There was nothing outwardly alarming about the coffeeshop—the tables were full, the baristas were smiling, and they were playing Top 10 Greatest Hits over the speakers—but the lingering feeling of dread was impossible to shake. I should’ve taken the tension in my throat as a sign then, should’ve hightailed it back out the door and given Mr. Manning an excuse as to why I couldn’t make it. I should’ve listened.
Instead, I did what I did best—shoved down the feeling and urged forward.
The first ten minutes of my meeting with Rachel and Reed’s dad went by without hiccup. I walked him through the website page by page, clicking on each link and triggering each animation. I held my breath throughout the whole ordeal, especially with his eyes raking over every inch of my work.
In its full glory, Manning Construction’s website was, objectively, so much better. Before, everything had been kind of jam-packed with small fonts and a boring color-scheme, but now, the rich maroon, gold, and silver would catch the eye of anyone scrolling through. The animations on the homepage popped up just as they were supposed to, and I’d even tweaked the mobile site enough times until the loading sequence ran smoothly for each tab. It took me longer than my normal web designs, but I was proud of each small facet of HTML code.
Proud, but sick to my stomach every time that I looked at it.
Once I got to the last link, Mr. Manning sat back in the metal chair, giving it a satisfied nod. “This looks great, Ava. Especially for someone of your age.”
Something about the compliment didn’t quite feel right to me, but I thanked him anyway. “I’m glad I was able to help you with this, Mr. Manning.”
“I’m glad too. And don’t worry, I’ll be passing your contact info along to that start-up company I talked about before.” He gave me a businessman’s smile. “And now for the exciting part for every teenager, right? Reed would always get so excited when he got his paycheck.”
The money. The main reason I’d accepted this job in the first place, threw my morals to the wind, and agreed to work with the enemy of my best friend. Before, I’d needed it. Now, with nothing imperative for it to go toward, this money felt dirty.
I looked at the frosted door of the café, almost as if I was about to bolt through it.
“Speaking of Reed and Rachel,” Mr. Manning went on as he rummaged through his things, “do they have dates to the homecoming dance?”
I tried to tell myself it wasn’t weird that he was being nosy into their love lives—a lot of parents were. “Um, Reed has a date, but Rachel doesn’t.”
“Oh, I saw her out with a boy the other day and just assumed.”
My eyebrows slammed together. “Rachel was with a boy? When?”
“Hmm…a few Saturdays ago? Not this past Saturday, but the one before it.” He pulled out an envelope, and from the brief flash as he turned it over, I saw my name scrawled along the front. “I was driving past the town park up near the school and I saw them walking along the sidewalk.”
I wasn’t dumb enough to ask him if he was sure—if it was his daughter, he’d know. But what boy would Rachel have been with that night? Whenever she hung out with a guy, she always made sure to tell me. No, she made sure togushabout them to me. And yet she was out Saturday night, walking around with a guy, and she never said anything? In the past few weeks, she never even talked about a guy except Josh.
A slow, confusion-riddled realization crept over me. “Was he blonde?”
