Speak Soft // p.w.

>Stories<> Chapter 24 <

Two hours later

Max's POV

Patty and I are sitting on the couch eating pizza when I hear the garage door open and close.

"Hey, they're back!" I shout as Emma and Luke walk into the living room.

"Yes, it's us, I know it's very exciting." She laughs as she sits down on the couch that me and Patty aren't on. Luke comes and sits down next to her. "Oh my gosh, I just had a random thought. Have we ever told everyone how we met, Mac?" Emma asks and I realize, I've never told anyone in the house how we met and I guess Emma hasn't either.

"No, we haven't. Should you tell the story or should I?" I ask.

"Let's both tell it." She smiles.

"Oh, yeah, I want to hear this." Patty laughs and Luke laughs too.

"Okay, we're the same age basically all the time so it was, the summer when we were both twelve." Emma starts off.

"It was when I still lived in Alabama and you-" I continue but Patty cuts me off by screaming.

"Woh oh my god I didn't know you lived in Alabama! I thought you were from New York!" Patty shouts.

"I moved to New York when I was thirteen but I was born and raised in Madison Alabama. Why do you think I've always talked with a small southern accent?" I laugh. Just from talking about when I lived in the south I can feel my accent becoming stronger for some reason.

"I guess I just haven't been able to pinpoint the accent until now. Okay but continue." He laughs.

"Well, I was still in Alabama and Emma had moved in down the street from me for the summer because her dad had some business thing, right?" I say and Emma nods. "We met at school because you moved in on like the last week of school and the teacher introduced you to the class and she had you sit down next to me. It was when school let out and you went to the house that was right next door to mine that you learned my name because we were like 'oh, lit, we live next door'."

"Yeah, you said your name was Max and I immediately said that I was going to call you Mac no matter what you said because I like the way it sounds and you said quote 'alright, I don't give a shit'. That's when I knew we would be friends. You were only twelve and already cussing to someone you just met." Emma says.

"Yeah, I was stupid and reckless back then and did shit that was probably illegal but nobody needed to know it was me. Or rather nobody needed to know it was us. You weren't innocent when we lived in that neighborhood." I smile back.

"Oh my god, we would have 'sleepovers' at other peoples houses in the neighborhood but our parents didn't really give a shit about us back then so they would just drop us off at their house and we would present to go inside and then we would meet somewhere and just run around and stay up the entire night." Emma mentions which gets me going on a whole kick about what we would do.

"Mhmm, and the neighborhood we lived in at the time was still being built so there were a shit ton of construction sites so we would break into the houses and just fuck shit up. Remember that one time that we took that big piece of wood and put it through a window on the bottom story of a house and used it as a see saw for like an hour until the wood snapped?" I ask with a little too much excitement.

"Oh yes that was so much fun!" Emma basically screams.

"Or sometimes if they had the entire framing of a house done but they hadn't put in the flooring for the second floor we would climb the wood and sit up as high as we could go and drink like a whole box of Capri suns and talk shit about people at school." I smile.