After getting dressed, I hoist my bag over my shoulders, and make sure my butt is covered by my sweater, feeling self conscious. In Albany, many people judged me for it, saying that I had too big of a butt. Since then, I made sure to hide it with oversized sweaters and baggy t-shirts.
"You're going to melt, you know that?" Ashton says as he walks out of his bathroom, running a towel through his hair.
"In a sweater and shorts?" I ask incredulously.
"It's supposed to be 100 degrees today, but I only live here," he says sarcastically, shaking his head at me and running his fingers through his messy hair.
He flashes me a thousand watt grin and I feel the corner of my lip curve up into a half smile.
I press my fingers to my lips, not believing that I could produce such an action without it being forced.
I haven't truly smiled since I was little and spent every Friday with my parents. It was like Sunday for churchgoers, a family day of rest. It stopped after I turned six and started school though. That's when they started to lose track of things like me.
I was never that important, but I'm still searching for that something more. There has to be more than my mom and dad. There just has to be.
Ashton takes me out to the car and I feel the suns rays falling down on me. I climb into the passenger seat beside him and stare out the window as he goes into the center part of town.
He stops and parallel parks in front of a long row of shops, and he stares up at one of the buildings with...admiration?
"Come on, we're heading up, I gave to go check on my mom and dad," he says, leading me into the building, and I follow behind him, my hand trailing up the wall, the feeling of the wall beneath my hand. I see the age and fading of the brick as a few pieces crumble beneath my fingertips, and we reach the upper level. It's completed with a couch, a bed in the corner, a small kitchen, a television in the corner of the room, and two happily married people sitting at a kitchen table with two mugs of coffee placed across from one another.
When Ashton said he needed to check on his parents, I assumed they would look older than this, but they seem to only be in their late forties, early fifties.
"How you feeling, mom?" He asks, placing a kiss on her cheek, and staring at her with a wide smile.
She looks over at me and points, raising a questionable brow.
"That's Giana Reese," he says to her, and she nods. "I'm dropping her at her grandparents this afternoon, no one was there to pick her up so I brought her home and let her sleep on the couch."
His mother then hits him on the back of the head, taking a sip of her coffee, and backhanding his shoulder.
"How would you like it if I made you sleep on that death trap you call a couch?! I'm surprised you didn't lose her in it!" She says, and I see her husband snicker under his breath, and he goes back to eating his breakfast.
"It's alright, really," I say, "I'm just happy I wasn't sleeping in an airport for the night."
"You'd die out there, you poor girl," Ashton teases, making fun of my parents lifestyle, taunting me for something if I can't control. I don't have that high of standards. I'm not that big of a bitch, am I? I hope I'm not that prissy.
YOU ARE READING
The Forbidden
Teen Fiction"Do you understand statistically the chances of something going wrong? It's worse than the chances of dying in a convertible. Four point three percent of people on a plane die in a plane crash, and that's not including planes that have gone missing...
