When Gracie is humiliated after following her best friend's brother to college and finds he's moved on without her, she grows closer to his rival--the captain of his basketball team--the infamous Kalen Rush, and suddenly Gracie wonders just what len...
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The standard issue clothes for Pinecrest Rehabilitation Center were always the same: cream colored pants and a matching shirt the same material as the scrubs that nurses wear, along with a pair of bright blue no-slip socks.
My dad had four pairs of the same outfit at our house, sitting in the back of his closet that he'd gotten to bring home after his previous stints in the center.
My father's eyes stared back at me from across the room instead of the manager currently speaking to us, and I found I wasn't able to concentrate on anything aside from the manic, bloodshot stare of the man who was always supposed to take care of me.
"Gracie? Is that alright with you?"
Suzanne smiled comfortingly at me with a hand on my shoulder.
I'd almost wished that Colby and Franny hadn't left me alone with my dad and their parents, but with her kind smile and familiar age lines I'd come to love like they were my own mother's, I edged into her warm embrace and ignored my father's harsh stare.
I'd gone through this enough times to realize what the manager was asking of me, and I only nodded after seeing that I was taking far too long to respond.
"Great, I'll get the paperwork all set up and ready to go, and everything will go through you two, like the last times. Mr. and Mrs. Hart, will you please follow me? Mr. Gatlin—please say goodbye to your daughter while we get everything straightened out, and then we'll have someone come to get you."
And then we were alone in a white sterile looking hallway with peeling pain and cracking tile beneath our feet.
"They didn't have to drag you all the way down here just for this—it's not like I was dying."
"But you could have."
He could've died a thousand times over with the amount of times he'd landed in the hospital to get his stomach pumped.
At least this time it was the people who'd practically raised me who had decided to take him in preemptively instead of waiting until he got to the point where I would've been visiting him in the ER.
"You're being dramatic. You need to be at school, not stuck here in this place with me."
"Maybe I want to be here with you."
"Why?"
He croaked the word so silently it was a wonder I had even heard him.
"Why wouldn't I want to be here with you?"
He hung his head so that the irises of his eyes were invisible to me, so that I was unable to see the expression on his face as he buried it with his hands, his fingers reaching up into his receding hairline to tug at the greasy strands left there.
"Because you don't deserve it, Gracie. Not one bit of it."
His words were muffled by his palms, but I heard them just the same.
