Ladies' Choice (re-uploading SOON)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Three reads later, I would like to plead for insanity, but I guess I've been a little insane—this insane—my entire life. So me being me wouldn't exactly hold up in court. I rested against the end of my bed, slumped on the floor, staring at the letter Daniella wrote...

I have been fighting with Daniella for the last three years and yet, when I read this letter, I couldn't hear her voice. I couldn't imagine her admitting any of it. This wasn't a voice I recognized at all. A totally different girl.

On my computer screen, the 2020 movie Emma played, and I listened with my air pods. The light in the room only came from the computer. Full screen was great because I couldn't see the time. This movie gave me pause. It had been so long since I watched any period piece outside of class, but the movie was beautiful. All the colors. The people. Especially the girls.

My eyes found their way back to the letter. The editing was super weak. More like she wrote it all in one sitting, her stream of consciousness spilling out from the ink onto the page. It made me wonder if she even went back to read through it.

Thinking back, I could see Daniella again, waiting for soccer practice to be over, sitting as far away as he could from other people, reading her book. Daniella traipsing through the halls of our school, avoiding people like they were going to kill her. Was... was Daniella James shy?

Dropping my face into my hands, I rubbed at the itchy fatigue trapped in my eyes. Why do I have to stay up thinking about Daniella?

With a sigh, the Emma movie graced me with the credits, and I finally crawled into bed, face down in my pillow, drowning in my exhaustion, and hoping to get swallowed up whole by the darkness. My mind was still so awake. I tossed and turned, plagued by old conversations and all the choices I've made without thinking. Why was existence so humiliating?

My bedroom door swung opened, cutting the darkness with a knife. Peeking past my pillow, my mom was at the door. "Hey, baby, are you still up for a morning jog?"

Turning back into my pillow, I asked, "What time is it?"

"About five am."

"Um..."

"You know, if you don't stay consistent, you're more likely to feel a tightness in your muscles and you're likely to fatigue."

"Mm hm, right. Okay. Um, hold on."

Taking a deep breath, I forced my arms straight, and I pushed myself up. I somehow managed into my workout clothes, and I was running across the pavement of our neighborhood while my mother asked about the standard stuff: grades, upcoming tests, and projects. She mentioned my Uncle Eugene's birthday dinner coming up.

"Is it at grandma's house?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said, but she obviously did. My mom was about as good of a liar as me, which was terrible. My mom and my grandmother have had issues the last year since Jess dropped out of college and left our house. It came to light my grandmother housed her secretly for about a month before my mom found out... however, Jess was already gone by the time my mother pulled up to drag her back.

I had never heard my grandmother shout before that fight. Didn't think that old people could scream, or they'd explode into powder. She visited me afterwards and handed me a small tear of notebook paper with an address. Jess's house. If I ever wanted to go visit. I hadn't.

Too many nights listening to my mother say to my father, "that girl doesn't realize how much money we spent for her to go to that college. She thinks she knows what she wants. She doesn't. She's twenty. You don't know anything at twenty."

"She'll come back," my dad said. "Her money will dry out and she'll come right back."

"Twenty years and she just leaves? Doesn't discuss it with us. Like it's our fault."