Blue Eyes

chapter 1

Haley Foster

It is just coming to the end of our first week of summer and what are we doing? Sitting in my non-air conditioned living room, with my little brother, eating Cheetos, and watching Friends. When is it going to start? This was the summer to do whatever we want, the summer of no regrets. Was this what everyone had been talking about? Stuffing our faces with food for the third day in row, watching Rachel and Ross hook up and then deny they have feelings for each other? I am not going to let one of our final summers together be like this.

I stand up and shut the TV off.

“What the heck?” my best friend, since forever, asks. She has a full mouth of Cheetos and is looking at me like I’ve ruined everything good in her life and she can never get it back again.

“Yeah, we were watching that,” my little brother chimes in.

“I’m bored!” I say as if it obvious. “Let’s do something fun!”

“Like what?” Bella asks. “We live in Omaha, Nebraska. There’s nothing to do that we haven’t already done a thousand times before.”

I know she is right but I have to take charge, “Let’s go to the pool.” 

They are silent for a moment when Bella says, “Okay but we have to run back to my house so I can grab a suit.”

We look to my brother, Michel, to see his reaction, “Fine, I have nothing better to do.”

“That’s the spirit,” I say as Bella crinkles up the half eaten bag of Cheetos and walks them into the kitchen.

Michel gives a deep sign as he pushes himself off the couch. He is only two years younger than me but I love him. I’m probably one of the only people on the planet that can say out loud that they love hanging out with their brother. We rarely fight and when we do it is always about something so ridiculous that we both just give up because we don’t see the point in hating each other over it. I wonder if we are this way because of everything we have been through. The only people we had to rely on were each other.

“Ugg. My parents are going to be home, kill me.” Bella says interrupting my thoughts. She is looking at her phone with a disgusted look on her face.

I sign, “Don’t worry, you’ll be in and out in two minutes. Just a quick hello will suffice.”

We stand at the door together as Michel walks out of his room in a t-shirt and a swim suit with a towel in is arms.

“We’ll be in the car, tell dad we are leaving,” I say.

Michel heads to the back yard knowing our dad will be in his shed working on something.

Bella and I make our way out to my beat up old truck that my dad saved from the junkyard. He fixed it up and gave it to me as a birthday present last year. 

I hop into the driver seat, swinging my keys in my hands. Bella slides in on the old fashioned bench seat and settles in the middle so Michel can easily jump in.

As I start up the car it makes an awful screeching noise but soon is filled with life.

“You really need to do something about that. It sounds like a dying whale,” Bella says as Michel jumps over our fence and runs to the car throwing his towel in the bed of the truck and slides in next to Bella.

“Is it necessary to jump the fence?” I ask as he shuts the door.

“Is it necessary for your car to sound like a dying animal?” he shoots back at me.

I shake my head and pull away from the curb.

“I said a dying whale,” Bella says in a monotone voice, looking straight ahead.