Page 33 of Fostering Chemistry
And then I heard her voice. My sister. The only true family I had.
Tears flowed down my face as I greeted her.
But five minutes later, the tears flowed for another reason.
Feeling dazed,I got up, went to the bathroom I shared with Jenna, and splashed water on my face. My very pale face, at least as it appeared in the mirror.
Numbness spread over me. I wanted to talk to someone about it. I wanted someone to hold me and tell me it would all be okay.
But the person I wanted to do that was Sara.
Blindly, I walked down the hallway, but not to go downstairs. At the far end of the hall was a narrow staircase that led upstairs to where Cody and Evan stayed. I’d never been up there, but I knew there were three bedrooms up there.
I climbed the steps carefully. Walked past a bathroom. Ignored the two closed doors and entered one with the door that was open.
The one that was supposed to have been Sara’s.
The air was stale. The furniture was a little dusty. It was obvious that no one lived here.
But it was clean, and someone—maybe Diego?—had carefully prepared it for her. There was even a little welcome basket on the desk with soaps and lotions. I’d received one like it.
Her bed wasn’t as big as mine. It was a double. And it wasn’t actually her bed. She’d never slept in it. But itfeltlike her bed, and that thought had me kicking off my shoes and laying down on my side. I put my arm under my head and tried to turn off my thoughts. Tried not to hear the accusations she’d shouted on the phone. Tried not to feel anything.
I blinked. Then blinked again. Eventually, my eyes closed.
Then I drifted away from the house, but to a familiar place.
To Tuppington Middle School, to be exact.
11
AARON
Frustrated,I tore the paper out of the legal pad, crumpled it, and threw it away. What I had written was so dumb that being in the trash was probably an improvement for it. And yes, I was the only student in the entire university who preferred to write things out longhand, in part because I already spent too much of my time texting.
It was a natural result when you had a family as big as mine. My grandparents had raised—and eventually adopted—over a dozen kids over the years, so we were a huge crew. Most of my siblings had already moved out of the house by the time I was taken in at age seven. But we were still family, and now I was an uncle to a half dozen little ones.
Between them and my grandparents, I was always getting messages wishing me luck on a test or asking how I was doing. It was sometimes a full-time job just to answer them. But I loved my family, and I knew how lucky I was. Still, it would be nice if one of them was a policy writer I could consult.
The problem that needed addressing was the very dim streetlights on the far side of the science building. They barely illuminated anything at night, which was both a tripping hazard and unsafe in other ways. Female students needed to be able to see when they were walking around at night. Everybody did, actually.
It was a no-brainer, but I couldn’t get the words right. Last year, I would have asked Diego for help with the phrasing, but he’d been different this semester—more distant and often distracted. I couldn’t figure out why that was, but any time I brought it up, he told me he was fine.
Cody was upstairs, but he wasn’t the best person to brainstorm with. Unless the subject was music. Then he was all in.
And then there was Mia.
As soon as her name crossed my mind, I knew I wasn’t going to get any more writing done this afternoon.
Not that the three sentences I had crumpled up really counted as writing.
I’d been thinking about her a lot lately. She was my favorite of the new roommates this year, which probably wasn’t fair to the others, but Jenna was never here, Raymond was an asshole, and well, Evan seemed like an okay guy—though he looked like he was fourteen. I just hadn’t spent much time with him.
Mia was just so easy to talk to. And fun to joke with. And fun to tease. And fun to sit next to on the sofa, side by side, talking, laughing and…
But it was just hanging out, nothing more. I wasn’t looking for anything more, and she wasn’t either. Still, it’d been a long time since I found someone I wanted to spend that much time with.
My phone buzzed, and I knew it had to be family. With a sigh, I turned it on. It was from my sister. I knew her as Katie… the people in the circuit court knew her as the strict but fair Judge Fowler.
