Page 6 of Promise Kept

Now that would have made my mother proud of me.

Anyway…

Angie and I were inseparable.

Until her father fucked my mother and it blew everything up.

My father did what he always did.

He tried to save my mother, save himself, and eventually got lost in drugs and took off for a while.

Angie’s family imploded and Angie ended up dying in a car accident not even a year later.

She took the family car out for a drive - my guess is that she was trying to run away - and she ended up going off an embankment and into some water and just…

Mind you, at that time, Angie and I were eleven years old.

After moving, I ended up at a new fancy school and on my first day I shared a cigarette with a girl named Love.

Is that her real first name?

That’s not your business.

All I know is that Love is the best friend I’ve ever had.

We made a pact that day to never smoke cigarettes again because they did not taste good to us at all .

She comes from a messy situation like me.

And speaking of messy, I see my mother starting to approach me.

Walking like a super model, drunk, looking for even more attention.

“Just get it over with,” Love whispers next to me.

I look at her.

She’s so pretty.

She’s got golden hair. Bright green eyes. Thin lips that gently curve at the corners.

I’m jealous of her beauty.

She says I’m prettier than her.

I don’t know about that.

“Look,” Love whispers, “just hug her. Shed a tear. Appease these money-grubbing assholes.”

“You know what she’s looking for, right?”

Love nods. “Play the game, Larissa.”

Larissa and Love.

We always joked that our names put together would make a great porn star name.

We even joked about maybe signing up to one of those sites and doing something together. We had a plan too. Never show our faces. Never do anything we both didn’t agree to. Split all the money fifty-fifty.

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