Define Ezria

Chapter 12

Do you know how dread feels?

Not.Good.

I woke up the next morning feeling wrong, for luck of better words. I even checked my temperature, but of course that wasn't it. Call it gut instinct, call it whatever you want. The uneasiness that clouded my very existence was distracting at the very least.

After spending two hours trying to concentrate on my school assignments, I gave up, in immediate need of a distraction.

Luck must have been on my side however, because the minute I threw my textbooks across the room, my phone buzzed.

I picked it up and smiled at the text.

Get your tiny butt at the Coffee House in twenty minutes. Friends' intervention.

Just what I needed. I threw my closet open and run my hand over the hungers.

My style wasn't what people called conventional or even normal. I had a very unique sense of style to say the least.

People would always atop and stare at me while walking down the street. Whether it was my outrageous yellow wedges, or my long feathered earnings, people talked. And pointed.

That used to bother me. In a town as small as Rosewood, where everyone knows everyone, it got annoying when people went out of their way to make a snide remark about my pink highlights, or my flowing kimonos.

My family and friends didn't care however and after spending a year in Europe I realized it's not worth crying over.

So it didn't even seem weird when I took a white lacy shirt out of my closet and paired it with brown riding pants I had bought from a horse ranch in Iceland.

"Where are you going?" My dad asked once I stepped foot in the kitchen where he was baking coffee and going over his work assignments.

"Coffee with the girls. Won't be long" My parents were cool with me coming and going whenever I felt like it. They trusted me in that way, but after Alison's death, Dad kept track of my whereabouts, since Mike and I lived with him and not our mom.

"Okay, can you pick Mike up from lacrosse practice afterwards?"

"Sure" I agreed but scrunched up my nose at the idea of a smelly Mike.

I put on my jacket and after waving at dad got in the car and drove the short distance to the coffee shop.

"Over here!" Hanna called once I entered the packed place, waving me over the table they had picked.

"Hey" I smiled at them and waved at Emily who was wipping a table across the shop. Her shift would end in ten minutes and she'd join us.

"You seem better" Spencer observed and I shrugged. "I feel better. Sorry if I got you worried I just have a lot in my mind lately"

"Don't we all" Hanna said and sighed. The four of us had been through situations most people don't get to experience, well not when they're just fifteen years old anyway.

It might have been two years since Ali was gone, but stuff like that can't be forgotten that easily.

"Is it a guy problem or something bigger?" Spencer asked bringing her mug to her lips.

Define bigger, was all I wanted to tell her, but of course could not. I hated lying to my friends so much.

"No it's nothing"