"Jess," Tyde started, I noticed him sounding somewhat nervous, "why were you adopted in the first place? I mean, what happened to your birth family?"
I look at the sky and the sea, and our sodas sitting in the sand. Taking a sip of my Sprite, I imagine it being like the champagne that Hazel and Augustus drink that night in Amsterdam, but it isn't. It isn't bottled stars, its a container filled with an assortment of crap in the form of chemicals. I guess not everything can be as beautiful as we wan't it to be. Who ever said that beauty was in the eye of the beholder, they were damn right.
"My dad was never happy go lucky, but he was a dad. He was, until the summer after I finished 6th grade. That July was when my father's father was diagnosed with brain cancer. He had same type that Caroline Matthews from The Fault in our Stars had, you know, the one that messes with your head to the point where you aren't even you. One day, you wake up, and you're some angry, violent child of cancer. My grandpa's battle lasted for two years more than the doctors gave him, and my dad lost a portion of his strength every day it went on. He kept going, though, until they day the war was lost. That day, it was almost like he received the disease from his father. Though he wasn't ill, he became the same angry, violent person." I stop for breathe long enough to note the vibration of my hands and the look of horror on Tyde's face. "Cancer wasn't done with my family after that. It had had its taste, and it wanted more. My mom got breast cancer. I can't talk about it to an extent, but I will say that cancer is a bitch, and she died in a month, the longest month of my life. My dad took his own life, but not before taking my only sibling's. None of my family wanted to handle the person I became, so here I am, an Oakley." Tyde is looking at me like I'm a mockingbird with a broken wing. I hate that look. "I started on a rough path, but now I'm on a different road now. I won't let my past be an apparition in my present, so don't treat me differently now."
I look at him nervously, and being me, I expect the absolute worse. What he said was the last thing I would have expected. "Can I take you on a date?"
