Healing Takes Time

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Dad's eyebrows raised the slightest bit. Wow. He was obviously surprised. "Really?"

"Yes!" Mom was practically bouncing off the wood walls with... I don't even know what this is called anymore. Excitement just wasn't a strong enough word to describe it. I honestly was starting to doubt that there would ever be words to express:

A.) How I felt at seeing legit emotions on my father's face

B.) Just how scared I was at how enthusiastic my mother was

C.) These weird feelings in my stomach whenever I thought about Freckles

Mom's phone chimed with a text. "Oh! She got my number. I wasn't sure if she actually would contact me." I squinted at her. She seemed worried for some reason. She shook herself and typed in something short. It wasn't long before she got another reply.

She was ecstatic.

I cringed and went up the stairs. We had already had dinner. Mikasa and Eren were on the second floor doing God knows what, and Connie was in Mom and Dad's room until they decided to go to sleep.

Eren looked up from his manga when I got to the top. "What has her so excited?"

I shrugged. "Apparently some old friends that they lost touch with are here too, and they're moving back to town, supposedly down the street from our house."

He raised his eyebrows. "For real?"

"Yeah."

"Have you met any of them?"

Marco's smiling face immediately came to my mind. I felt a sudden urge to keep the rest of my freak-show family from meeting him. "Maybe."

He looked at me expectantly and waved his hands. "And...?"

He's really super nice, and he never stops smiling. I may not have had much time to talk to him, but I know that he would never say anything bad about anybody, and he probably doesn't cuss either. He's got these freckles all over the place, and sometimes it's hard for him to see out of his right eye because of a stroke, but I wouldn't change that about him because, as he said earlier, that's a part of what made him him.

"He's nice."

His look said, Really? "That's it?"

"What book are you reading?" I asked, hoping to distract him. He lifted it off the floor enough for me to read the cover. "Attack on Titan? What's that about?"

"These giant derpy giants called Titans like to eat humans. The humans built a series of three circular walls to hide behind to keep from getting eaten. 100 years after they do that, these two other Titans crash through the first wall, and everybody is either eaten or has to move inside the second wall. Basically, it's about trying to kill the Titans." He furrowed his eyebrows at the book. "But it's kind of creepy 'cause we're in there too."

I cocked my head to the side. "Whaddaya mean?"

He pointed to a person on the cover. It looked just like him. "That's Eren." He flipped around until he found another person and pointed to him. "That's Jean."

Sure enough, it looked like me if I was a cartoon character. "Weird," I muttered.

I sat down next to him, and he showed me Mikasa, Levi, Hanji, and Connie. By then I was more than a little creeped out. I also noticed that the book Mikasa had a red scarf that she never took off. Our Mikasa had a red ribbon necklace with a charm on it that she never took off. Except she got hers from our Grandma Carla on Mom's side.