CHAPTER THREE
Itching to do something to distract herself from the ache in her chest after the events with Tyler the day before, April spent most of her first day back in Magnolia Springs sorting through her old bedroom.
She was surprised to find how much she enjoyed rediscovering all her old teenage possessions, as they brought back memories that she had hardly thought about in the few years since she’d left for New York.
Stuffed in her closet and dresser, she found plenty of clothes she’d forgotten she owned.
They were nothing like the wardrobe she’d painstakingly curated in the apartment in New York.
No, these were all brightly colored dresses and skirts, cropped tops and even shorter minis.
A handful of items still fit, so she kept what she liked and put the rest in a pile to donate.
There were also some real gems scattered around the room.
After fifteen minutes of emptying out drawers she found a too-small friendship bracelet that Emma had given her when they were around ten, the lime-green color faded and the cheap beads that spelled out their names a little yellowed.
April smiled as she brushed her fingertips over the letters EMIZAPRIL.
Farther down in the same drawer she found a picture of the three of them, corners curled slightly, taken the night of their senior prom.
Emma looked stunning in a vibrant red dress with a thigh-high slit, and April remembered how hard her friend had had to fight with her mom to be allowed to wear the daring number.
Izzy looked gorgeous, too, her mint-green dress the perfect shade to complement her fair skin, and her hair piled high on her head.
April had forgotten how much she’d loved her own dress—lilac with a sweetheart neckline and small flowers embroidered onto the skirt.
It had felt so her, and she wondered vaguely where the dress had gotten to, since she hadn’t found it shoved in the back of her closet.
She shook her head. She was a woman on a mission to clear up her room, and she was determined not to get sidetracked hunting down relics of her high-school fashion.
A stack of binders, left over from finals presumably, sat on one side of the desk covered in a thick layer of dust, and she sneezed as she opened one of the notebooks tucked inside.
The familiar scratch of her handwriting made her smile as she flipped the pages before stilling at the back of the book where a long, slanting hand had left her notes.
Only a B on the mid-term? Gonna have to work harder if you want to be valedictorian.
Kiss my ass, Pointer.
Luke had drawn a little kissy face next to a cartoonish bubble butt, and April’s lip twitched as she shut the book. A “B” was a perfectly respectable grade—or it would have been if Luke hadn’t been Mr. Straight-As.
A photo fluttered out of the pages and slipped to the ground, landing near the pile of stuff to donate that she’d accumulated so far.
It was her graduation ceremony from high school, where she’d been awarded co-valedictorian.
Her smile looked pinched, forced, as she stared at the camera with Luke at her side.
She’d forgotten all about this picture—she’d lied to her mom and told her she’d lost the photo, when the reality was that she’d gotten tipsy with Emma and Izzy and had drawn large red devil’s horns onto Luke’s head and a forked tail from his ass.
Not her finest moment.
Enough time had passed now that she could probably tell her mom the truth, but …
“Better not,” she muttered, tucking the photo away inside the notebook again before looking around the organized mess of the room with her hands on her hips.
Her gaze snagged on the small bottle she’d found earlier while tidying and had placed on her nightstand.
It was full of sand in different layers and colors, a collection from childhood road trips to the beach, sealed with a cork.
As a kid, it had seemed larger than life in her tiny hands as her dad helped scoop a little bit of beach into the small opening in the glass.
In reality, the bottle fit in one of her adult hands with the cork reaching the tip of her middle finger while the base touched the bottom of her palm.
She could still picture the gentleness of her dad’s hands as she cupped the grains, letting them trickle through his fingers like spun gold into the bottle and sealing it up tightly.
That way, you can carry a little bit of sunshine with you wherever you go, he’d said, and in her mind’s eye his smile felt so bright that her chest ached with the thought that the memory of his grin was all that was left of him in the world now.
April turned away from the bottle and refocused on the textbooks and folders on the desk, finding more scribbled notes between her and Luke, as well as Emma and Izzy.
A bright-orange Post-it was stuck to one of the pages inside her history textbook, an arrow drawn to point at an illustration of a weeping woman with a large boil on the end of her nose.
In familiar sloping handwriting, the word by the arrow simply said: You.
Pointer. Bastard. She remembered this. It had been a Monday after she’d been camping that weekend down by the springs with Emma and Izzy; at some point during the night she’d been stung right on the tip of her nose.
The swelling had gone down a little on Sunday but it was still bruised and throbbing by the time the school week started up again.
Make-up had only made it look worse, and had burned like hell to apply, so she’d had to go without.
It was just like Luke to capitalize on her mortification.
Done reminiscing, she turned instead to the drawers in the desk and her many hidey-holes.
The wooden desk under the window had a row of small drawers on each side of the chair, one of which she’d had to pry open with force because the wood had swelled shut.
Inside, she’d found the remnants of one half-smoked joint, an expired pack of condoms, and a bottle of Jack that was mostly full.
Clearly what was left of a great summer—though she barely remembered hiding the stuff there now.
She had assumed her parents had cleared all this out when she’d moved to New York, but here it all still sat. Waiting for her.
She snapped a couple of photos and dropped them in the group chat, receiving a reply almost instantly.
Emma:
Oh damn, we getting wild tonight???
Emma:
I mean, I’m down
April snorted. Of course Emma would be OK with a night of mayhem. She was a cheerleader through and through—for good decisions and bad.
April:
Hahaha, no. Found it in my desk drawer, I think from summer break the first year of college
Izzy:
Not the JD *gags*
Emma:
as soon as we’re back in town, that bottle is HISTORY babe
It was typical that while April was back in town for the first time in months, both of her best friends were away. Izzy had a work conference two towns over, and Emma was in San Francisco for a photo shoot. Though, she’d see them soon enough. Monday at the latest, hopefully.
By the time four in the afternoon rolled around, she’d cleared space for new clothes, showered off the dust coating her, and her stomach had begun to growl warningly. Luckily, the slamming of the front door solved that problem.
April bounded down the stairs and threw herself at the tall man in the hallway who’d just finished taking off his work boots.
She collided with him with an oof but his arms came around her automatically, squeezing too tight before he let her go.
“April?”
She grinned. “Surprise!” Even threw in little jazz-hands to make him laugh, and it worked—for about a second, anyway.
“What are you doing here?” Noah narrowed his eyes.
He’d added more tattoos to his collection since she’d last seen him.
Thorny vines trailed up his arms and under the short sleeves of his tee, but the newest addition looked to be the angel wings that crested on either side of his neck and wrapped around the sides of his throat.
“Visiting,” she said casually, turning away from her brother and leading him into the kitchen where their mom was setting the table. She eyed the bags of food in his hand eagerly. “What did you get?”
“Enough for two,” he said pointedly and she pouted. His eyes widened as the bright lights of the kitchen hit her. “Your hair—”
“Yes, yes. I dyed it.”
“It’s green.”
“Teal,” she corrected and his mouth twitched, teeth sinking into his lip, before he let loose the laugh clearly building inside of him.
“Asshole,” she muttered and Kathy looked up sharply.
Honestly, April didn’t mind the color—though it wouldn’t last for too long, she was sure, considering it was a cheap and temporary box dye.
“That’s enough, you two. Noah, you and I know full well that you probably over-ordered just like always. And don’t make fun of your sister’s green hair.” Their mom turned away but not before April saw the grin on her face. “April, don’t call your brother an asshole. It’s not nice.”
She and Noah shared a look. “Yes, Mom.”
Noah set the brown bags in the middle of the table and April sat down opposite her mom with her back to the kitchen, the same way they’d sat for breakfast. Noah didn’t question the change, just slid in next to their mom without comment and began spreading out the contents of the takeout.
The empty place to her left felt gaping, obvious, but April did her best to ignore the strangeness of it.
Being here with her mom and brother, a family of three now instead of four, would take some getting used to.
“Enough for two, my ass.” April gaped. “Two armies, maybe. Are you single-handedly keeping this place in business?”
Noah rolled eyes the same color as her own. “It was a long day. I couldn’t be bothered to cook. Shut up and eat your noodles.”