Page 7 of Before We're More Than Friends
Isabelle shrugged. “Hey, I’m speaking facts.”
“You wish.” I sighed. “Normal is someone like you. You don’t have compulsions or worry about . . .” I noticed that Penrose was playing with something in the grass, and worry spiked in my chest. “Worry about accidents happening.”Like that Penrose can get hurt from whatever is in that grass.Or that she’ll drop it, and another dog gets hurt instead.Or one of us steps on it and?—
Isabelle squeezed my hand tighter this time. “I’m not leaving your side.”
“Thank you,” I said before taking a breath and giving her a small smile. “I mean it.”
As soon as I got home, I turned on my playlist to start making Alex’s bracelet. I took out green and blue beads and black star-shaped beads. I drew what I wanted the bracelet to look like in the notebook before starting to put the beads on the bracelet string.
When I made bracelets, all my worries melted away. Mythoughts were occupied with threading each bead carefully as I hummed along to my favorite songs.
After fifteen minutes, I smiled at the creation in front of me. To make the bracelet more unique, I used two shades of green and two shades of blue, alternating shades each time. I placed a black star in the middle to top it off. I put the bracelet on my wrist to make sure it was sturdy enough before packaging it in a green bubble mailer.
I jotted a note on a purple piece of paper. I debated throwing it away since it seemed a little too personal, but I added it to the bubble mailer anyway.
I hope you think of me whenever you wear this.
I did hope he’d think of me whenever he looked at it. That he’d see me in a happier way than I viewed myself right now.
Around a week later, a new letter came in the mail. This time, the envelope was stuffed, as if there was something else in it. I ran to my room to carefully unwrap it, and a purple-and-green bracelet with an identical black star fell out. A smile spread across my face as I read the note attached to it.
I hope you think of me whenever you wear this like I’ll always think of you when I wear mine.
At that moment, I knew this wasn’t going to be a friendship we would maintain just for a school project. This was the start of forever.
CHAPTER 3
Dallas
PRESENT DAY
Life would be so much easier if packing things in boxes was as easy as taking things out of them.
It’d been a few days since I’d started packing, but I only managed to fill three boxes out of who knew how many. And given how I kept looking through old stuff and thinking about my fond memories, it didn’t look like much packing would happen.
I opened the box of letters I’d kept in the closet since my seventh birthday. I’d decided to make a Valentine’s Day box with my dad in first grade, and even after eating all the candy and misplacing the Valentines, I put the huge shoebox in my closet for safekeeping.
Eventually, I started using it to store all my letters from Chloe in there. I flipped through the letters in the box until I found the first one she’d sent me. A smile spread across my face. Though I’d read this letter about a thousand times in my lifetime, it never failed to make me grin.
I took a picture of the front page of the letter before sendingit to Chloe on Connections, a chat app we’d been messaging each other on since when we were in sixth grade. We’d decided that sending letters back and forth took too long to be our main way of communicating, and I didn’t regret trying the app when she’d asked me to download it.
Alex
Going down memory lane. I had no freaking idea what I was in for
Chloe
Only meeting the best girl in existence
My cheeks warmed. She’d only been joking, but she had no idea I actually viewed her that way.
Which was why meeting her in real life could ruin everything.
Alex
I’m not sure the best. Maybe the most interesting?
Chloe
