Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
He’d made his point. He cared. Okay, great. Caring didn’t equal trust though.
Did it?
“You’re gonna wear a hole in your floor if you keep pacing like that!” he shouted from the other side of the door.
I froze and squeezed my eyes shut. Of course he heard me. It wouldn’t have been my life if he hadn’t. “Go home, Camden!”
“You still got those bruises? Then I’m not going anywhere. Because if you have those now, it’s gonna get worse one day. And it might be during the school year when I’m not here to sit on your porch for the next eighty days if need be. I know you’ve got your brother, but it’s never a bad thing to have a friend watching your back too.”
I walked to the door and dropped my forehead against it. “Why are you doing this? You’ve only been back, like, three days.”
“What’s that got to do with anything? You might have hated me while I was gone, but you were always my best friend.”
A shrill You barely even know me! hung on the tip of my tongue. I guessed that wasn’t true anymore, was it? Camden Cole knew me in ways no one else ever had.
But he didn’t know it all. He didn’t know about our dirty house or how only one of the toilets worked but only half the time. He didn’t know I had to hide food from my dad or how on more than one occasion he’d passed out with a cigarette in his mouth, so I slept with an expired fire extinguisher under my bed.
People made assumptions based on how we looked and where we lived, but nobody truly understood Ramsey and me.
Ramsey had chosen to let Thea into our hell. She knew all the secret little details of how we survived, but I’d always been of the mind that letting someone in would only run them off.
Maybe that was exactly what I needed to do to Camden—run him off before he had the chance to realize, friend or not, I wasn’t worth staying for anyway.
Snatching the door open wide, I stood on the curled linoleum revealing the concrete slab of our entryway and let out an aggravated groan. “Just come in already.”
“Well, when you say it all sweet like that…” He stood up with a grimace and shook out his legs. “Ah. Ah. Ah. Pins and needles. Pins and needles.”
“That’s what you get for sitting out there all day. After that storm, you’ll be lucky if you don’t catch pneumonia too.” My anxious stomach knotted as he lumbered toward me. I’d never invited anyone into our house before. The point of this was to show Camden the real me and run him off, but I couldn’t help but be embarrassed all the same.
“I don’t catch pneumonia, Nora. Pneumonia catches me.”
I scoffed and perched a hand on my hip in the rickety doorway. “Then you better get in here. I’ve played tag with you before. Trust me—you aren’t that hard to catch.”
“That was before I carried the Alberton Middle School track team to an eighth-place participation ribbon at the city meet. There were only eight teams and I carried the water more than anything to do with running, but you’re talking to a track star now, Nora. Time to show some respect.”
I would have laughed if I hadn’t been holding my breath when he strutted inside. He stopped abruptly at the edge of the carpet. Frankly, it only resembled carpet in the sense that it had a few fibers left between the bald patches.
This was it. This was the moment when he looked around, realized the filth in my life wasn’t limited to our house, and took off.
It was for the best, really.
He’ll bolt any second now.
He didn’t need a friend like me dragging him down.
Yep. Soon he’ll be long gone.
“If you want to leave—”
He looked at me, those damn blue eyes boring into my soul. “Any chance I can borrow a towel? I’m gonna soak the floor if I walk on it in these wet clothes.”
I stared at him for a beat, searching his face for any sign of disgust or sarcasm. I couldn’t have blamed him; I cringed every time I walked through the door too. But Ramsey and I had long since given up on trying to be my father’s maids. It didn’t matter how many times we attempted to make things look presentable, we were always just one drunken night away from my dad ruining it.
Camden stared at me, waiting for a response, but all I wanted to do was cry.
There was no criticism. No pity. No repulsion.
Just a little confusion and a touch of impatience.
“Nora, seriously, pneumonia is catching up fast.”
All at once, I became unstuck and jogged to my room, grabbing the towel from my creek bag before returning.