Where to Begin

Chapter 26

The next few weeks were quiet except for when Benjamin came over and Stevie and Conor visited a couple times too. They're my best friends as well as the Booths and I had fun going to the mall with them and hanging out with them. It was nice to get out of the house for a while and away from the boys.

Lillian also bought me a new phone so I could phone her or Aubrey if I ever needed help which I thought was a good idea because of all the stupid stuff that happens.

I had spent nearly exactly four and a half weeks with the Booths' and I must say that most of the time, things were never boring. The boys kept being boys; having fights, doing pranks, arguing etc. Aubrey still hadn't told Jackson about the baby and I was getting worried that once she had the baby that she would leave and cut everyone out her life. Like she did before I came into the picture and she had broken up with Jackson.

"You are going to keep it, right?" I asked bringing the laundry basket to my room.

"Oh, yeah, I'll have the baby but I don't know if I'll give it to a more worthy family, you know?"

"I don't I'm sorry." I said opening my cupboard looking over my shoulder at Aubrey who was sitting in her usual spot on my bed.

"What are going to do about Connell?"

"Oh, please don't bring that up, now. We were just talking about you." She looked at me and sighed.

A few minutes passed, with me packing away my clothes quietly while Aubrey sat quietly on my bed, staring out the window.

"Aubrey?" A low voice appeared at the door. Sawyer poked his head in the room, a distressed look on his face. "Jackson wants to speak to you." Aubrey shook her head as she pushed herself up from the bed.

"Hey...Ladybird," Sawyer nodded. "Can I sit?" He pointed to my bed. In the whole time that I had been with the Booths, I had never had a real conversation with Sawyer. He came and cautiously sat at the end of my bed.

"What is it? Is something wrong?" I asked getting worried by the fact that all of sudden Sawyer wanted to talk to me.

"No, nothing is wrong. I just thought, you know, we should have a chat because, well, we haven't really had a proper chance to talk about anything,"

"Okay, well, what do you want to talk about?"

He leaned on his elbows, just looking at me as I sat at the head of my bed. "What was life like in California?"

A flood of memories came rushing back to me. All the hard times with my dad, the night my mom left but what really broke me down the most was the happy memory of first moving to Tofino, when my dad was still sober. Both of my parents were still so happy back then and I could picture a specific moment when we had finally finished unpacking the house. My mom was laughing and dancing to her loud 80s music playing off the TV and my dad was working on our boat, whilst I was drinking in the new freedom of being in a new country. Little did I know what lay ahead in the future.

"Ladybird?" A soft voice broke me out of my daze.

"Oh, you know, not much different from here." I made an excuse.

"What was there to do?"

"Well, most of the time..." I tried to think up a story. "I would ride my bicycle around our property to you know, explore and we would always take out the boat, everyday at five in the evening, just as the sun was setting." I told a tiny white lie because we did do that stuff when we first got to Tofino but when my mom started working and my dad had nothing else to do (and he started drinking), it obviously stopped.

"So are your parents still there, in California?"

"Yes," I answered quickly. "Yes they are."

"So you're here by yourself?" He asked quietly.

"Um...I'm looking for a house because I'm moving out here by myself."

"Oh, so young?"

"Yep." I smiled through gritted teeth.

"Aren't you scared?" That made me laugh.

"Of course! I'm petrified. I've never spent so much time away from my parents before in my life."

"So why are you moving out here then?"

"It's a long, complicated story."

"I have time," he said, looking into my eyes. He had deep brown eyes, like most of his brothers.

"I'm planning on going to college here and I thought that if I moved out now and lived by myself now that it would easier for me to live away from my parents," I said, making my lips a thin line. "So, um, what school do you go to because you're in college now, right?"

"Yeah, um, I go to UCLA in Cali, actually."

"Really? So, you're home for the holiday?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

"That's nice." There was this inexplicable awkward silence that hung in the air. "Um...what are you studying?" I tried to break the silence.

"Gynecology," he said. "I want to be a gynecologist or neonatologist," he said quietly, lowering his head to look at his hands.

"What's wrong? You don't have to be ashamed of studying that, at all. In fact, that's amazing!"

He slowly lifted his head.

"Sawyer?"

"I know that Aubrey's pregnant."