Page 15 of The Tattered Gloves
THE REST OF the day went on much the same.
Many stares, lots of questions.
No answers.
I was sure I was the talk of Sugar Tree High, but I didn’t care. The drama of school was something I found oddly comforting.
Don’t get me wrong; I still hated it. The whispering, the laughter, and the never-ending stares. But it never changed. Whether I was here or in DC, it didn’t matter; teenagers were the same in every state.
Well, most of them anyway.
As I sat on the couch in my aunt’s living room while she sang to herself in the kitchen, my thoughts drifted back to my encounter with Allison.
She seemed to break every rule I knew.
She was obviously popular and well liked. If the looks and the designer clothes hadn’t given that away, seeing her float from person to person down the hall was a dead giveaway. But the way she’d treated me? It seemed genuine. In the past, I’d had other encounters with kids who’d acted like they were trying to befriend me, only to find out it was a bet — some cheap trick to win over the quiet, weird girl… whose feelings didn’t matter.
But Allison seemed different.
And that made it all the more terrifying because I found myself wanting to like her back.
What good could come from that?
“Did you get all your homework done?” Addy called from the kitchen.
I nodded, quickly realizing she couldn’t see me from my curled up position on the couch. “Yes,” I replied.
“Good. You haven’t really said how everything went. Did you find your classes okay? Make any friends? Learn anything?”
“Um,” I managed to mutter.
“Why don’t you come over here and help me fix dinner? That way, we can chat. I can barely hear you over this meat sizzling in the pan.”
She could barely hear me because I hadn’t actually said anything, but I didn’t bother correcting her. She’d evidently ignored my advice from this morning to give up and was making a solid effort to get to know me.
Walking into the small, boxy kitchen, I took the wooden spoon resting on the stove and began to idly stir the ground beef. Addy was chopping fresh tomatoes and lettuce on a plastic cutting board next to me, humming and happily swinging her hips. She’d changed out of her wacky attire for the day, opting for a pair of plain black sweats and an old T-shirt. It was still strange to look at her with those familiar blue eyes. But, the more I got to know her, the less I saw of my mother staring back at me.
The resemblance would always be there; there was no doubt about that. The twin gene ran strong with those two, but everything else was starkly different. Addy carried herself with pride and a kind of joy I’d never seen my mom have. I didn’t understand how two women, both raised in the same household, could turn out to be such polar opposites. One so happy, and one so—
“Are you going to tell me about school?” she asked again, her eyebrow raised in my direction, as she scooped the tomatoes into a serving dish.
“There’s not much to tell.”
“Did you meet anyone?” she asked.
“Not really. Well, one person,” I amended.
“Oh, yeah?” She perked up, stopping everything she was doing to divert her full attention in my direction.
I felt my insides quiver at the sudden spotlight thrown in my direction.
“Tell me about it.”
“It was just some girl who has a locker next to mine,” I said, shrugging.
“What is her name?”
“Allison.”
