Page 1 of Insta-Love

ONE

Ava

New page, new book.

The plain grey brick exterior of my parents’ home glares back at me like an old friend long left behind. I swore I’d never be so low as to have to come back, but hey, best intentions and all that, right? I lean over the tailgate and hoist another box from the back of my truck. At least I managed to achieve one thing while I was gone: I bought a car.

Whoop-de-fucking-do for me.

There’s no need to turn around to know that Mrs Canshaw over the road watches me through her net curtains. The woman is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. I drag the cardboard box that holds a quarter of my worldly possessions toward me and hoist it into my arms, back straight. Pride fills my steps as I walk into the open garage and through to the house. Fuck the nosey people in this neighbourhood; if I want to return to my parents’ house, I can. So fucking what? It doesn’t mean I’m a failure.

Although I sure feel like one.

“I’ve put the others in the spare room,” Dad lets me know as I pass him in the lounge. “I figure you can sort out what you want me to store in the garage, and what you want kept at arms reach.”

“Thanks.” I offer him a small smile as I step through the door to my new-yet-old room. The paint’s been redone since I left as a teenager, but the furniture’s still the same.

Full circle, huh?

“Is there anything you two don’t eat that I should know about?” Mum calls from the kitchen. “I’m about to head out to the supermarket.”

“No. We’re good.” I set the box down on the bed as the other half of ‘we’ turns up in the doorway.

“Where do I sleep?” Lily tips her head as she looks around the room, picking up on the single bed in the centre.

“We’ll push this to the side and I’ll have an airbed until I can afford to buy us a second one.” I drop to the mattress and pat the bed beside me. “Come give me a cuddle.”

My daughter, the reason to get up each day and face this bullshit head on, comes over and climbs onto my legs, curling into a ball to fit. At eight she’s more legs than anything else now, but she’s also not too big to need her mum when things get tough. Although, things the way they are right now, I’d say I need her more than she needs me.

“I can have the airbed,” she mutters into my tank top.

“I want you to have a proper mattress, baby. I’d hate for you to be going to school with a sore back, or tired because you didn’t sleep okay.”

“We can take turns.” She pulls back, sun-kissed auburn hair slipping into her face as she does. “You one week, me the next.”

I hook a finger under her overgrown fringe and tuck it behind her ear. “Sounds like a plan.”

She’s so much of me at this age that some days it’s like watching a real life photo from my past: same hair, same wide eyes, same rounded nose. But that mouth, especially when she smiles lop-sided like this—that’s all her father.

I swallow hard and wrap my arms around her, tugging her close. She slips an arm around my waist and nestles in tight. “It’ll be okay, Mum.”

“I know. We’re a team, eh?”

“The best.”

She’s also my glue, the only thing keeping my heart from becoming dust. Falling pregnant at seventeen was never my life plan, my goal. Ask me when I was sixteen what life entailed for me, and I would have said years spent at university training to be a Veterinary Nurse. My dream since I was younger than Lily. But once upon a time, many years ago, a girl met a boy and life took a sharp turn off course.

Glen was my everything; he made it that way. I lost my relationship with my parents because of him. I bunked school, and I skipped out on going to my afternoon job, all to be with a guy I thought would be my life thereafter. We were damn Bonnie and Clyde, running around and getting into trouble, throwing the proverbial middle finger to the world. I loved him. He told me I was it for him. “I don’t care if we have nothing,” he’d said. “I could be living in a cardboard box under a bridge with you and I’d be happy.”

He lied.

I missed my period and put it down to stress. We’d almost been caught jacking a car the week before. Cops had tailed us for three suburbs before we lost them. The car, half stripped and with parts sold to five scrap dealers around the city, was buried in the overgrown grass by the river. Glen told me we’d save the money we got from the wreckers for a plane ticket out of here, that we’d fly wherever the whim took us and make a new life. I wondered how the fuck I was supposed to do that with no passport, but he had a way with words.

He made me trust him.

Lily was born seven months later, premature and fragile at thirty-three weeks. I spent nine weeks in the hospital with her before they felt she was strong enough to leave. What was quite possibly the most stressful time in my life was almost a blessing in disguise. The hospital provided me with a bed and food to be near my baby. They took care of me when I couldn’t think of anything other than my daughter who needed me.

The lowest point in my life? When the nurse asked if there was anybody I’d like to call to bring me a change of clothes. I cried. I sobbed for half an hour while I told her that I had nothing but the dirty washing stashed in my backpack, that the only person left in my life had no phone, and the tears fell hardest of all when she asked where my baby’s father, Glen, was and I told her the truth: I didn’t know.

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