Nothing Wrong With Loving

Chapter 1: A theme park, a bottle of Smirnoff, grey clouds and Cecily Hayes.

"Ceci, come on, get down!" I shouted, looking up while Ceci climbed further away from me. She laughed louder and her laugh echoed around the whole place. She was almost at the top of the rusty roller coaster.

We were at the abandoned themed park just outside of town. We had two weeks left of sixth form, everybody wanted to celebrate and the theme park had become some sort of meet up spot for the younger population of our town. It was the only "fun" there was. It was either this ghost park, the mall, the beach or the cinema. I've never liked going to the beach and the cinema was a dead end because they only had three screens and showed the same shitty movies for months.

When the park was still opened, it was the public hangout place, I still vaguely remember my parents bringing me and my brother when we were kids. Sadly, though, just because everybody from town came every other weekend, it didn't mean it was enough to keep it up and running.

It was a big deal for me and Ceci when it shut down. Cecily was infuriated, she even wrote a letter to the council pleading and demanding to keep it running. All she got was the councilmen showing up at her house to congratulate her for her grammar at such a young age. All she cared about was the stupid park, where am I going to hang out with my friends when I get older? She had written in her letter.

Truth be told, that was our dream. To live our teenager years like in American movies, we wanted to have a cool hangout place, a place where we'd have our first date with some boy, probably have our first kiss while riding the teacups... Ceci and I spent hours daydreaming, waiting until we could be old enough to come to the theme park on our own and do the things older kids did.

It seems kind of stupid if you think about it; we spend our childhood daydreaming about being older, excited to do the same things others did before us, deceiving our minds to believe that for some inexplicable reason we're going to be different than the ones before us and even than the ones after us. We thought we'd be special but, in this town, no matter what people try to make themselves believe, everyone is pretty much the same. The same beliefs, same ideas, even the same aspirations. We're copies of copies of the ones that were there before us.

It isn't living, it isn't surviving either, it's just— getting by. And the thought used to terrorise me, it scared the living hell out of me to think there was a possibility that I'd end up being exactly what I hated the most, being part of the never-ending circle.

"Stop being a little shit and come up!" Ceci shouted, her voice was carried by the wind, loud and soft. "Please, Nina."

Groaning, I looked up. Ceci was looking down at me, a little smirk on her lips. I wish I could say no, just once, just a simple no. I think, had I been able to say no, just one time, I would've saved myself a lot of pain. It's not that I'm a people pleaser— it's just that when it comes to Ceci it's just different.

I made my way up the roller coaster, carefully taking each step as I went. I could hear the rest of our friends shouting, singing along the music and laughing somewhere around the park. Probably by the pools where Kai and the other guys liked to skate.

When I finally reached where Ceci was, I took a seat next to her. She had a 35cl bottle of Smirnoff in one of her hands, with the other she was playing with the lid, her long legs were swinging over the edge as if we weren't 30 meters above the ground as if there was no chance of falling and dying.

I guess that was one of the things I liked most about Ceci, she was never scared of anything, no matter how reckless or stupid it was. She was Cecily Hayes and she was one of a kind. I actually kind of envied that of her, I wish I could be like that, open and brave.

She took a sip and rested her head on my shoulder. "Don't you feel different being up here? It's like... I can breathe better or something. Besides, this is so high up none of them fuckers dare come up here." She giggled. I tried to smile, looking down at the ground.