***1st Place Winner in Teen Fiction for the Undiscovered Writer Awards***
***One of the EarnestyWriterAwards favorite female leads***
Lulu's mom is sick and Lulu desperately wants to be free of all her troubles so she convinces herself that she no l...
With her cellphone's flashlight on, Lulu raised her hand up and shone it towards Zac. His tear streaked face stopped her short, and she was sure he had flinched ever so slightly when the light had hit his eyes. His hair was completely disheveled, indicating he had run his hands nervously through it over and over. He looked so sad that Lulu's heart actually clenched in pain when all she wanted was to hurl her anger at him, knowing how much he deserved it. It wasn't fair that he could be such a jerk to her and still manage to move her to feel even an ounce of sympathy for him.
Hastily wiping his face, he scoffed at her. "I could ask you the same. Were you following me?"
A ghost of a memory flitted through her mind; an echo of a different voice, her own, asking a boy if he had followed her to the lighthouse that night. Shaking it away, she focused on the boy who stood in front of her now.
"Of course not!" Then, softer, "Are...are you alright?"
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The night was cold. Her fingers felt stiff around her phone and the wind was biting into her skin. When she looked at Zac properly, she could see him shivering in his thin Ramone's T-shirt. In the glow of her light, a halo of blue surrounded him making him look ethereal.
"I'm not so sure you're being honest, Lulu," he said dryly, ignoring her question. "You know, you always show up when you're the last person I want around."
Lulu pretended his words didn't sting and only kept quiet. After a second, he continued. "What are you doing here, anyway?"
"How did you manage to get all the way up here alone?"
"Answer the question," he insisted, suddenly urgent.
"You first," she challenged.
"You're infuriating, you know that?" He shook his head and huffed out in exasperation before answering her. "I'm not here alone. Obviously. It's not like I could have walked all the way from my grandparent's house to here, blindly, is it?" He spoke to her as if she were a stupid little girl, which must have been exactly what he thought of her.
"Wait, your grandparent's house?"
"That's what I said."
"I thought you lived with Liam's parents," an inexplicable sense of dread was beginning to climb up her spine, like the spindly legs of a spider, creeping up her back and coming to rest upon her shoulders. There was something familiar about this, but it was far and her fingers couldn't quite grasp what it was.
"No, we live with our grandparents," he closed his eyes for a second, clearly frustrated. "There you go again, nosing around where you are clearly unwelcome, Lulu," her name spat out like a curse form his lips.
"Why are you always such a prick!" she couldn't help the sudden burst of anger. He had grated on her last nerve. There was nothing that she could have done, that she hadn't already apologized for, to deserve his animosity. "Every time I see you, you act like I did something unspeakable to you and frankly, Zac," she spat, "I'm tired of it!"
