Wren

Prologue

Two months ago

"Mrs's Adams I just need you to help me switch... it can't be that hard... I had three offers, Baylor, Boston and the O. Can I not change my mind" I ask desperately.

Mrs's Adams looks up from her paperwork on her desk, she looks to me over the rim of her glasses, and she slowly shakes her head side to side and looks back down to her job at hand, which was not me or my hysterics this afternoon.

I had been in to the counsellors office four times this week, so you must understand it's not that she's a shitty counsellor that lacks empathy, she's exasperated by the girl in front of her, a girl she knows well and had begged not to pick her university choice on her girlfriends, and I did.

I loved Ava, I wanted to be with her, and to be scouted together by the same university was a dream, we couldn't believe it, it seemed like we were fated to go and to grow together, through university, and I was ecstatic, she was too, we were floating on air. I didn't heed the warnings from my coach nor my counsellor to think about it hard, I took Ava's hand and we jumped in head first to our future.

Idiot.

There was a real good reason I never told my moms that I picked the O for Ava, because they would have forced me to go visit all of my options and then make a decision on which I preferred from that. My professional career as a soccer player was always on my moms mind, she saw that there was potential, she set me up with the best coach, the best physio, and of course she nurtured it, the talent she saw in me. I knew mom was proud of me, and proud of my sports prowess, but it wasn't my first love, not like basketball was for her.

Ava Montgomery was my first love, and my first priority. I made a mistake, because unlike Soccer, Ava wouldn't still love me in three months time. I didn't know that though, that she would take it all away, take the love I felt and squash it like it never existed in the first place, reducing us to friends in mere moments.

Fuck, to erase two years of love and romance in a two minute conversation.

"Wren is just a friend from school" she had said to the boy who took her arm that day on the porch. She had looked up to him with this smile I won't ever forget, a smile once reserved for me.

Ava had been letting me go slowly, it wasn't for my benefit, I can tell you that much, because what she did to me was let me live a hellish three months of not knowing where I stood with her, no, this was for her. She let me go slowly so it didn't hurt her so much, so she could slowly release my hand and take his, this meat heads, "Connor Dickhead McGee's"

I'm not sure if Connors middle name is dickhead, but it should be, because it suits him and his smug smile, the one he gave me as he assessed me stood there, three steps below them. It made me seem so much smaller at the time, my small frame seeming meek, like they both looked down on me, and it's how I felt.

Ava was above me now, her new identity forged in the fires of her parents church, the weekend camps they had been sending her to since they found out about us, they had changed her, three months of calling me the devil who tempted her, it had made her see me as such, it seemed. Connor was the golden boy who attended every church meeting and read the bible to the kids in Sunday school, he was her parents wet fucking dream!!

I remember shrinking as she said it "Wren is just a friend from school" and she meant it, she had made herself erase us, so all she saw when she looked at me was "Wren my friend" and I can't tell you how that one moment changed me, school was two weeks until the end, our exams were over, our colleges picked, our graduation looming, and here I was stumbling away from her porch, her house, as she called after me, and I felt a break, somewhere deep inside she broke something in me.