Blue Love

Chapter 1 through 6

Chapter 1

Only three weeks until school started and Tessa knew something awful was brewing at home. Her parents, who always had little arguments in front of Tessa and her four siblings, stopped arguing over a month ago. Maggie, her mother, was busy organizing the house, which meant emptying every nook and cranny, including each closet and cupboard in the old farmhouse. Her father, John, was consumed with farm work as he was every summer, dodging rain and summer storms while the crop session was in full swing.

Tessa and her brother, Alex, were already skipping out on helping due to fall sports practice and try-outs. Alex was playing football for the first time this year. He’d always wanted to try out, but things were very busy on the farm. Maggie insisted her husband encourage him. It was his last year in high school, she wanted him to fully experience it and Alex needed the distraction. He hadn’t been quite the same since the accident that left him without his cousins and best friends. Alex was devastated and broken. Tessa had her own way of coping with the tragedy.

* * *

For the past two weeks, Tessa and her cousin Jade’s field hockey team had practice at the same time as the football players. They would wait for Alex and his best friend Ryan and watch all the freshly showered, shirtless hotties walk out of the school. The hottest ones always seemed to be wearing white baseball caps. The two girls would lean back against the truck and take in the view.

School would be different this year. Because of state and federal budget cuts to the education system, some of rural schools in Central New York, had been closed at the end of last year. The girls called the newbies, “implants.”

Tessa and Jade waited until the last of the hotties ambled out of the locker room, then headed to the pond to swim. They were splashing around, discussing the all the possibilities for the upcoming year, when Alex pulled into the clearing with a truck full of his teammates.

“Here come the ‘white hat boys,’ Tessa.” Jade grinned from ear to ear.

Tessa and Jade were lying on the raft in the sun when a bunch of guys swam out to the floating raft. They climbed up and shook the water from there hair. Tessa noticed a couple of them looking at her chest and became uncomfortable in the bathing suit she wore, the attention to her newly formed chest, unwelcome. She dove in, swam to shore, and quickly grabbed her shirt to cover herself. Jade followed behind but walked slowly out of the water, bending forward and then threw her hair back, pulled it over one of her shoulders, and rung it out. She smiled at the group of white hats and bent down to grab a towel, wrapping the lower part of her body.

Tessa tossed Jade’s shirt to her. “You’re naughty, Jade.”

“Look at them. I think naughty would be fun.”

Tessa walked to the truck and jumped in the driver’s side. Jade smiled and waved as they pulled out. Tessa noticed one of them staring. He was tall, dark-haired with light eyes and donning the familiar white hat. She tossed back her hair and kept driving.

* * *

The next morning Jade’s alarm sounded. It was the first day of her senior year and she had no desire to get out of bed so she hit snooze and rolled over before finally sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of her bed. She walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. You better fix that hair, she thought, before started the shower.

Jade turned seventeen in May. She was tall and well developed. Her hair was long, black, and beautiful. Her parents had divorced two years ago, and her mother lived an hour away. She lived with her father, a contractor. She was the youngest of three children including older twin brothers who would have been in their first year of college but had died five years ago in a horrible accident, an accident where she lost both of her brothers. A loss so great to that it tore the family apart completely. Her best friend and cousin Tessa was her rock, the reason she was still somewhat normal.