For the next several days, my sister bugged me nonstop about going to see the boys next door. I was not as enthusiastic as she was. As much as she wanted to see them, she did not want to go gallivanting through the forest by herself, and when she found out the route by road was about two miles, she decided it was too hot to go that way, too, even though it was only about eighty degrees outside, which isn’t nearly as hot as California in the summer.
The next morning, I sat across from Gray at the table while she ate a huge bowl of her favorite cereal and I sort of half-heartedly picked at a piece of toast. I wasn’t hungry. I’d been thinking a lot about what had happened with Raven in the woods yesterday. It wasn’t that it seemed like Ben was mad at her--maybe he was--it was her circumstances that were weighing on my mind. I didn’t understand how anyone could send their daughter off to live with strangers half a nation away. It was troubling and made me appreciate my parents even more than I had before.
Walking in the woods, about an hour later, I couldn’t get Grandma’s words out of my mind. She hadn’t elaborated, and no one had asked her to, Grayson had stared at her and then me but ended up heading out of the room. I hadn’t asked either. I’m not sure why. It seems like the sort of thing anyone one would’ve asked for clarification about, but I didn’t. I felt like, deep inside, I knew it was true, though I wasn’t sure why.
We walked back through the woods toward Grandma’s house. Gray seemed to forget what had happened with the flower almost immediately, but it stayed on my mind. It seemed so weird that the bloom had just turned to sand in my sister’s hand. I was pretty sure that flowers weren’t supposed to do that--not normal ones anyway.“Who’s at your house ri
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at my sister’s comment. There was no way that Sam had the hots for me and the fact that she was saying he did said more about her than it did about him or me.Raven said nothing, which I found surprising. I expected her to say something like Grayson’s comment was stupid, that Sam had a girlfriend, or he liked older g
As much as I thought Sam could be a jerk sometimes, he was polite enough to hold the door for all of us while we walked into the diner, which was really nice. The moment I walked in, though, I stopped walking, right in the middle of the entryway, causing Gray to bump into me.It wasn’t that the diner wasn’t almost exactly what I’d been expecting. Th
“Hey, Ben!” Sam called as Ben approached our booth. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans with a stained white apron tied over the top of them. Even in his work clothes, he still looked better than any of the other guys in the restaurant, and that was saying something considering how attractive they all were. I gave him a shy smile, not sure what to say. Would he think it was weird that I was here with his roommates?
As I stared at the fifty dollar bill on the table, Grayson made her way over from visiting with the guys who’d stolen her attention. I tried to pull my eyes away from the money, but it wasn’t until after Gray had introduced herself and forced Ben to scoot over, into me, that I realized what was going on. I slid all the way to the wall, barely making enough room for my sister, with Ben pressed up against me.
Once our food came, we ate in relative silence. Gray got up quite a few times to refill her cup, use the bathroom again, and basically do whatever she could to speak to the hot guys that were already in the restaurant and those that arrived while we were eating. A lot of them were older than me by at least four or five years. Gray didn’t care. She would flirt with a dad if he was hot.