Midnight Rose (completed)

Chapter 1

The early morning sun warmed my pale cheeks as I stood in front of my open window. Summer break was officially ending, and I longed to soak in the last few days of freedom. Pounding footsteps drew my attention to the driveway where my best friend, Kendra, was jogging up, huffing and puffing dramatically. By the time she reached the house, I was in absolute hysterics.

"How...can...you...laugh at me...in this...state?" She stopped just below my window. Her hands were gripping tightly around her bony hips, and her head hung between her knees as she tried to catch her breath.

Still smiling wildly at her expense, I pulled my long hair up into a knot, catching every chestnut strand, and wrapped a hairband tightly around it. "Come on, Kendra. You're building character."

"Abby, I barely know how to put one foot in front of the other quick enough to make actual strides, let alone build character."

Stress creased her forehead as her lungs expanded and contracted quickly. "I think...I'm having a heart attack," she choked on her words. "One more month, Abby. One more month."

Kendra had failed her driver's test three times, so her mom made her wait six months until she could take it again. To build character.

"What are you waiting for? Me to let down my hair? Come in," I teased.

True friends were hard to come by in high school. The slightest things made you an outsider, but nothing would ever come between our friendship. She moved here just in time to save me from drowning in a thick sea of depression. We were one in the same in so many ways. We were seventeen, neither of us had ever been on a date, and we spent most of our time watching old movies. I had become accustomed to being alone before I met Kendra. I even liked it, but it was nice having someone again.

My dad traveled quite a bit for business, and my mom kept herself busy with her knitting club. I didn't know something like a knitting club even existed, but it did, and my mom filled my closet with a plethora of proof, not that any made it out of the house.

"I'm still perfecting my technique, sweetie," my mom would say each time she presented me with one of her latest creations. She raised my uncool meter by many degrees, not that it was low by any means.

I joined Kendra at the bottom of the stairs, grabbing my messenger bag and slinging it over my neck. "I take it you aren't going to miss walking to the bridge?"

Wide eyes met mine. "You're kidding, right? I still think it's weird your parents won't let you drive."

Interlocking my arm in hers, I pulled her out the front door. "I have a closet full of knitted sweaters with one arm noticeably larger than the other. Weird is my life." 

As we started our ten-block walk to the Cedar Street Bridge Marketplace, I relished in the last month of earth-producing warmth in my little town of Sandpoint, Idaho. The population boasted less than 8,000 people. Small was an understatement. For example, Spokane, which was the closest major city to us by seventy miles, housed over 200,000 people.

I grew up here, so all I knew was small-town living where everyone kept tabs on everything, and you couldn't look at a boy without it spreading through the whole student body within minutes. Learning the art of silence at a young age saved me from a lot of humiliation at the end of eighth grade when my world crumbled like a stale cookie. I became distant from my childhood friends, trying to hide the emotional devastation that hung around me like a dark cloud. Those friends quickly turned on me, taking personal offense when I chose a complete stranger over them. Kendra had moved to town near the end of summer before ninth grade, and we had stuck together ever since. She was the only one who cared enough to not ask questions and to just be there for me. The rest of my so-called friends were too wrapped up in boys, fashion, and who the next top model would be. Kendra was an enigma—the mysterious and beautiful new girl—and could have been friends with anybody, but she chose me. And I chose her.