Between the Lines✔ [COMPLETED]

[19] "Before"

Malory

"Do you always travel home?" Kyle asks, stepping through the front door and taking a slow three-sixty surveillance of the house. He shoves his hand into his jeans' pockets and sighs, pressing his lips together and, with them, forming a straight line. 

"I do," I say. I chip my way over to the living room and drop my bag unto the couch before collapsing onto it myself.

Kyle doesn't sit. At first, he seems reserved and quiet as he observes my house –but I know that he'd done exactly the same thing the last time. 

"What?" I ask, smirking up at him, tiredly. "Is my house too small compared to yours? I'm sorry I don't have a filthy rich uncle."

He shakes his head with a pout, "Nope. It actually feels pretty cozy."

"Yea," I say.

"But it's really quiet," he comments in a lower tone. "Just like home."

He continues to scan the room and I observe him as he walks past the couch. His eyes hurry across the words of a quote painted unto a canvas and framed to hang against a wall. They travel to the floral arrangement that's slightly off the centre of the coffee table. He walks over to the bookshelf and skims through the titles of my mom's science books.

"I knew your mom was a vet," he says, reaching out to take a book that has intrigued him, "But I didn't know she was such a highly regarded one."

"She worked her ass off to get a position like that," I say. "She deserves it, too."

"After everything that's happened I don't see why not," he says. 

There's another moment of silence as he skims through the pages of the book now in his hands.

"That's why you took control of the animal rights group, isn't it?" He asks, "Because of your mom?"

Truthfully, it's not just because I love and care about animals that I took up the position of president for the group. It's because my mom was always so smart and I just wanted to have this one thing in common with her. Genius as I am, I'm not like her. She's a lot like Kyle –she can sit at a desk and pour over math equations all day, list all the scientific properties of a human and animal body, solve a problem in less time than the average person takes to do it.

Though my capacity to retain information is incredibly large and I can memorise any concept or idea fairly well, I'm still nothing like my mother. 

Mom influenced me to like animals ever since I was young –but that didn't mean I was ever going to be good at telling the difference between the causes of death of two dead fish swimming in the ocean –not literally, but you get the idea.

"I did it because even though my mom and I are close, I'm more like my dad was. She was always this smart science geek with a passion for helping animals... and my dad and I would always be the ones pouring over literature books and other languages. If I tell people I'm a lot like my dad they'll think I was close to him –but that's just not true. I decided to take up the whole group presidential thing because I just wanted to have something in common with my mom. I wanted her to be able to talk to me. I wanted to see her eyes light up when I came home to talk about it," I say. "It made a difference, you wouldn't believe."

It did –because my dad caused a lot of trouble in this house all the time, and it took my mom bare strength to get through each day. The least I could do to help was attempt to follow in her footsteps –even just slightly. Her smiles mean the world to me.