THERE SHE GOES | ❝This is the worst day of my life.❞
Seventeen-year-old Hallie could have thought of a million better places to be staying for two weeks than her Aunt's home. But since her parents have cleared off for a romantic getaway, she wi...
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN ❛ i have a burning question. ❜
I DIDN'T LIVE IN BROWNSVILLE UNLIKE MOST OF my classmates. I actually lived in Uniontown, which was located southeast of Brownsville and was no more than a twenty minute drive from there. If you're wondering why I didn't just go to school there, then you're asking the wrong person. We didn't even have family in Brownsville at the time I starting going to school there, so who knows what my parents were thinking...
Then again, I never would have met Calvin or Stanley if I hadn't gone there.
As we approached nearer my neighbourhood, I started to give Stan directions to my house. It was kind of bizarre, and something I never thought I'd be doing — sitting in Stanley Barber's car and leading him to my home. But hey, life works in mysterious ways, right?
I couldn't wait to get home for multiple reasons. First off, whilst I appreciated his good intentions with the band-aids, the way they'd been placed had restricted my hand movement to simply waving with a crooked hand; I longed to get inside and replace them with a bandage. Second of all, I wanted to drop off the remains of my beloved cello, so that I didn't have to stare at it when I came back to Sydney's house tonight...
... Which I was going to do, absolutely. I owed her an apology, and vice versa. It would be way out of my comfort zone but if I was staying with the Novaks until my parents returned, then it was worth staying the full course, right?
Just in case I'd lost track of time, I set an alarm on my phone to ring at 8pm, which I figured was the cue at the very latest to be getting home again.
Stanley pulled up in front of my house and peered out of the window. "Is this it?"
"This is it."
I opened the door and stood before the semi-detached house, seeing my curtains still drawn from the very top window — just the way that I'd left my room when I departed to stay with Sydney. The four or five steps leading up to the front door had been coated in a blanket of dry brown leaves, that crunched under our feet like shattered glass as we stomped over them. Shaking my bag a little, I heard the jingle of my house keys and, for the first time in days, I grabbed them and turned them in the door's lock.
Wiping my feet on the doormat, I sighed at the stuffy air that enveloped us instantly as we stepped in, the urge to fling open a window taking over me. Nothing felt special about stepping back into the house — apart from the relaxation about it being my own home, where I could do what I wanted — for it was just the same family furnished, mediocre-looking house I'd been used to living in. Stanley, on the other hand, scanned his surroundings in awe.
