Infinity and Beyond

Chapter 1

  It was the longest summer of my life. It was scorching hot outside – too hot to do anything – and we were all miserable, hanging out in the living room with the air conditioning blasting. 

  “Justice, move over. It’s my turn,” my older sister, Kirsten, grumbled to our brother.

  “No way. It’s still my turn,” Justice shook his head, scooting closer to our huge, ancient fan that was sitting in the middle of the hardwood floor. It was whirring away, and shaking like crazy.

  “It’s been your turn for half an hour, man,” Tyler, Justice’s best friend, pointed out.

  “You’re not helping,” Justice said as he shot him a dirty look.

  “I know,” Tyler smirked.

  “This is ridiculous,” I groaned from my spot in the armchair, where I was sprawled out with my legs hanging over one side.

  “You’ve got that right,” Kirsten agreed, sending a death glare to Justice. Kirsten’s death stare was practically legendary; her light, blue/grey eyes could get seriously intimidating.

  “No, not your guys’ little… fan dispute. This is,” I spread my arms out, gesturing across the room. “We’ve been looking for a job for two days now, it’s been summer for more than a week, and we haven’t done anything besides sit here and procrastinate.”

My name is Angel Simmons. I’m a small-town sixteen-year-old girl, and right now my life consists of eating, sleeping, helping my mom, and traipsing around town with the other with the other three people that were in the room with me. I’ll introduce those people, because I know you’re wondering who they are. The first is Justice Simmons, my seventeen-year-old brother. He may be older than me, but sometimes I swear that he acts about nine. Kirsten Simmons, my eighteen-year-old sister, was “stuck” at home for a year after she graduated before she went to university, and she lived to boss the rest of us around. Tyler Hall is our best friend. He’s seventeen, he loves all the same things that we do (which includes music, food, and video games), and he’d lived next door since we were all really little, so we were pretty close friends with him. And me? Well, I’m the youngest, which basically means that I have to fight to get the others to listen to me.

    Tyler groaned from his spot on the floor. “Well, what else are we going to do? It’s been way too hot to do anything besides this,” he commented.

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged, my cheeks heating up.  Why did he always have to make me feel so immature?

  “Stop PMS-ing, Ty,” Kirsten scoffed. She threw a crumpled-up piece of paper at his head, which he dodged and tossed in my direction, hitting me in the arm with it. Shooting him a half-hearted glare, I started to smooth the sheet out, wondering what it was.

  “What are you doing? It’s just going to go in the gar-” Justice asked, frowning.

  “Hold up, hold up, hold up,” I cut him off, my eyes widening as I skimmed over the words written on the page in my sister’s scrawling print, “Kirsten wrote it.”

  “What?” Tyler leaned over my shoulder to see, his hot breath unintentionally sending shivers down my spine that I tried my best to ignore.

  Tyler was my biggest challenge in life. He’s my brother’s best friend, our next-door neighbour, and, as cliché as this sounds already, he was pretty much my object of obsession. Okay, I didn’t mean to make that sound weird, but I’ve had a crush on him since I was a kid. The fact that he never seemed to notice me really didn’t help my situation. But who could resist liking Tyler? He was really good-looking… perfect black hair, eyes the colour of milk chocolate, and golden skin due to his Pakistani heritage.