Balconies

Chapter 1

My name is Lilly Rogers. I have lived in Greenstone for fourteen years. I moved to North Carolina when I was two years old and ever since then have lived in a town so small it isn’t even worthy of a map. It’s as simple as this, you blink and you miss it. Life here has always been this simple. Day in, day out I knew that everything would be fine because drama didn’t easily penetrate this small town. I knew that this was a fact…until high school.

The boys, clothes, hair, make-up, homework, cars, and crappy emotions flooded me like it had been raining for three days straight. I wasn’t mentally, emotionally, or socially ready for anything that involved high school. It took everything I had to survive two years into this school. You would think that things would get better but they don’t. Especially when you get new neighbors.                                 

    You would think that having a girl my age moving in next door would be amazing. It was until I met her…and her brother. Don’t get me wrong, I love Amber to death. I would take a bullet for her in two seconds. She has always been there for me and she is the best friend I have ever had. Now here I am debating what went wrong with her parents because they seemed to be so absent minded that they gave their son the room with the balcony. The one that is literally an inch away from my balcony. So now I have an amazingly hot guy that could walk on his balcony and talk to me. Any girl would be psyched but, not me. Wanna know why? It’s my bestfriend’s brother and he is the love of my life. He doesn’t know it yet though. The problem is I am in love with my bestfriend’s brother. That goes against every best friend code there is. There is only one question left to ask… Am I willing to break it?

First Day of Summer

“Wanna go to the beach,” I ask Amber.

“No, it’s hot,” Amber replies, whining.

“How about the mall?”

“I’m broke.”

“Well, I don’t know then. You shoot down every one of my ideas. It’s the first day of summer Ambs. We should have exciting summer plans.” Here I am sitting in the girly room the belongs to the most hyper and conceited girl I know, Amber Mays. She is a pretty strawberry blonde with curls that come down her back. She has a pretty figure, if you don’t count the fact that she is 17 and an A cup, and a sweet smile that makes any guy melt. She’s the kind of girl that can make you feel self-conscious by just looking at her.

“I complain because I am bored. We don’t have summer plans because my jerk of a brother canceled his party!” She says yelling so he can here in the room across the hall. She shouldn’t even mention Brandon. He is one of the sexiest guys I have ever seen. He is thin and has some cute abs. He has black hair that is a little on the longish side, and blue eyes that could pierce the moon. He is the lead singer of a rock band too, that just makes it so much better. I have been in love with him since the day I met him. He is Amber’s older brother but only by a year. He is a senior in our high school and all the girls ignore him surprisingly.

“Yeah, what a jerk,” I say, trying to cover up the fact that he is all I think about. He would never go for me even though I am perfect for him. I am into all the same things he is and I am not exactly ugly. I have long, straight, black hair with major side bangs. I wear a lot of eye liner and people call me emo but, I have never cut myself. I have c’s and I only weigh 97 pounds but, I still feel self-conscious around Amber. I wear a lot of band tees and skinny jeans and people just assume that I have cuts on me because of this. I listen to his band all the time even though Amber and Brandon don’t know it.

“Hey. Let’s go watch a movie downstairs,” says the hyper Amber who moved from her desk chair to the door in a burst of enthusiastic energy. I move from her bed to the door and follow her down the stairs to the living room. Their house is huge because their parents make really good money. Amber’s dad is an attorney and her mom is a marine biologist. They are almost never home though because her dad works all the time and their mom stays overnight a lot with some of the animals they bring in to study for signs of oil spills that have affected them in the area. It’s really awesome though that they have the house to themselves most of the time. They throw wild parties that almost always seem to end with the cops showing up at the door.