brenton's girl

fifteen

The next couple of weeks were completely blissful now that I had reassurance that no matter what happened to Brenton, I would know. I believed he would be safe, at least I tried to believe that anyways. As I made my rounds through out the hallways at school passing out catalogs for student council, I heard my name being called.

I looked at Sam and smiled, she was walking towards me with Carson on her arm. "Hey guys, sorry I'm kind of busy right now."

"Yeah, Yeah," Sam said sarcastically. "Miss treasurer and all." I rolled my eyes and passed a flyer to both of them.

"Does your family have any plans for thanksgiving?" Carson asked me.

"We usually get together with family from dads side, so we're probably just going to continue that tradition. Why, what's up?"

"My family doesn't celebrate thanksgiving since were Muslim, but I do like the celebration. I was thinking that we could all get together and celebrate the thankful holiday." Sam looked at Carson with a scrunched eyebrows and a wrinkled nose.

"You should write for hallmark."

"Sam." I scowled. "I'll talk to my parents about it. We usually rent a venue because of all of the family we have coming down." I thought back to the words Brenton said, We work for everything we get. We do not have some rich daddy that buys us everything we want. I wondered how many people thought of me that way.

"A whole venue?" Carson asked. "That's a bit much."

"Yes. I know." I said.

"The Jacksons just go all out apparently." Sam added. I wanted to walk away from the conversation, from the fact that my dad does buy our family whatever they want with his mysterious amounts of money.

"I'll talk to them, okay?" Carson nodded and hugged me. "I got to finish passing these out before lunch hours over."

I waved bye before continuing my debut down the hallway.

-

When school was over I drove myself home and walked inside, surprisingly both of my parents were home. "Hey mom, dad." I said skipping into the kitchen. I placed my book bag on the island and sat on a stool.

"Hey honey, how was school?" Mom asked.

"It was good. I had to pass out tons of papers for council though, that was tiring." The sweetness dripping from my voice was enough to make me sick, but my mom and dad fell for it nonetheless.

"Oh nice," dad said. "Have you thought about possibly putting these leadership skills into an actual career?"

"I'm not quite sure yet, I'm still leading towards surgical." I said. Dad nodded and picked up a stack of documents, then walked out. "Carson actually gave me a good idea today."

"Oh, what is it?"

"Carson's family is Muslim which means that they don't actually celebrate thanksgiving the way we do, but Carson likes the celebration part of the holiday. And since we always rent a venue, I was thinking that we could invite them to come to the venue. Possibly along with our other friends." I was secretly crossing my fingers under the island, hoping that she would say something along the lines of, "oh that sounds great, sweetheart."

"I mean, we do have the whole place to ourselves and I know that you guys don't particularly know all of our family, but it's still something I have to talk to your dad about." My mom sounded to be having a mental conflict, wanting to do one thing while doing the other.

"Will you tell me whenever you know?"

"Of course." She smiled and kissed the top of my head, then walked to the freezer, taking out a pound of ground beef.