Alyssa Chávez has felt alone for most of her life. She was never good at making friends. She always felt a distance between her and her family. So when the apocalypse happened, her social life didn't take much of a hit. After losing her family, Alys...
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Chapter Twenty-three Introduction To Romance
Alyssa stood in front of her new canvas with an outline sketched on it. Her future vision of Alexandria stood in the corner waiting for her next meeting with Diana. Until then she had a little time to make some decorations for her room. It felt like she spent every moment she wasn't with Diana and Maggie behind her easel. She didn't mind, but whenever Alyssa saw Carl it looked like he was lost somehow. Like he was looking for something.
Neither of them had really made a connection with the other kids yet. They got along fine and they were really nice, but they didn't really know each other yet. Carl and Alyssa spent every waking moment together on the road. And now they had separate rooms, separate houses, separate jobs.
Alyssa thought it might be good. It gave her time to think about if she actually liked Carl or if the crush was just a fluke caused by them being together 24/7. But Carl seemed to miss her. He didn't have a hobby like she did. He had nothing to keep him busy other than books and school in the afternoons.
Alyssa stepped back from her canvas after noticing something out of place from the corner of her eye. She put her paintbrush in a cup filled with water and walked over to the window. The girl she met—Enid—approached the wall behind her house. Enid created some kind of ladder with metal rods and climbed over the fence. Curiosity got the better of Alyssa and she planned to follow her. She left her room and rushed down the stairs in the hope of making it in time to catch up to her.
Maggie and Glenn were sitting in the living room and turned to look down the hallway the second they heard footsteps approaching. They looked nervous and it frightened Alyssa a little. She froze at the bottom of the stairs, looking like a deer in headlights.
She awkwardly approached the two on the couch, giving them a very suspicious look. "Am I in trouble?" Alyssa asked hesitantly, slowly walking toward them as if she was approaching a wild animal.
Maggie shook her head with a reassuring smile. "No, of course not," she answered. "We just want to talk for a minute. Come sit down," she invited, gesturing to one of the lounge chairs. Alyssa sat down. She still wasn't convinced there wasn't anything wrong.
"We've been talking a lot recently. You know, just about Alexandria and the future. We care a lot about you and we obviously think of you as family. And, uh, we talked to Deanna yesterday. She suggested the possibility of adoption," Glenn explained. "It's not a big deal like it was before. We'd just sign a contract or something."
"And you don't have to say yes," Maggie added. "You don't even have to answer right now. You can take all the time you need to think."
Alyssa's lips parted in surprise. Whatever she was expecting, this wasn't it. She'd long thought of the group as her family, especially Maggie and Glenn, but to make it official seemed scary. It was like cutting off her old family, abandoning them for a new one.
