❝Who're you?❞
❝Fallon. I'm your candy striper for the next two months. Who are you?❞
❝I'm a lonely, incredibly depressed, cancer-inflicted, dying, nineteen year old boy.❞
❝Nice to meet you, a-lonely-incredibly-depressed-cancer-inflicted-dying-ninete...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
fallon.
"What do I have to do to make you say yes?"
"Fallon-"
"Please!"
"No."
"Mom!"
"No!"
I groaned and tipped my head backwards, my head lightly clashing against the wall behind the barstool I was sitting at, "Fine, your loss. I'll just sell my soul to Satan. At least he loves me."
"It isn't a matter of love or Satan, don't you understand what you're asking of me?" The middle-aged brunette in front of me laughed in a way that somehow was humorful but humorless - otherwise known as the infamous Mom laugh - and continued to store plate after plate into the overhead cabinets in the kitchen, "You're not asking for permission to go to a pool party or a midnight movie, you're asking for permission to go to Rome, Fallon Nicole Kayna. Alone."
Huffing out a breath, I brought my fingers up to scratch at the brown strands attached to the crown of my head. "I won't be going alone, Adri would be coming with me. Because y'know, Adri's Mom actually said yes. Because Adri's Mom actually loves Adri."
Mom snorted and threw her head over her shoulder, turning to me with both her thin eyebrows arched up. "And is Adri's Mom going with the two of you?"
"No..."
"Then Adrianne and her Mom can kiss my foot."
Both of my fists slammed down on the countertops, "Mom!"
She grunted loudly, sounding and looking exasperated with me as she turned around to glare at me with eyes that both begged me to simply understand her, like the mature-eighteen-year-old thing to do, and also simply begged me to shut up because she was getting tired of the sound of my voice "If you think I'm going to allow you to go to Rome, where there are bars and pubs and alcohol and men over the age of twenty one, with no adult supervision, you're deranged."
I bit down sharply on the tip of my tongue to keep me from saying something that, in the end, would only strengthen the chances of accidentally edging my Mom into shoving a fork down my throat. Because in all honesty, after living with her for a sum of eighteen years, I knew damn well that she would.
Truthfully, all I'd really wanted to do in that moment was evolve into my inner-brat and talk back at the woman who'd held me in her uterus.
Maybe I'd yell at her for refusing to allow my best friend and I, both legally adolescents in the United States of fucking America, to go to Rome for the summer. Maybe I'd yell at her for not even bothering to tell me not to joke about morbid things like selling my soul to Satan, like any other Mom would. Maybe I should just pull out a couple more bucks of nerve and ask her to buy me a G-Wagon and a black pug, as well, dammit.
