Chapter 1
Everly
So far, starting over sucks. I wish I could see it as an adventure.
A blank canvas. A fresh start. Mostly I just feel alone, anxious and kind of sick to my stomach.
As lives go, mine before wasn’t particularly spectacular, but it was mine.
And to protect my family—what’s left of it—I moved to Blue Lake.
I like the idea of doing it for self-sacrificing reasons, like for my sister, who doesn’t deserve the fallout of my drama.
But the bigger reason, the hard one to admit, is that I was just done.
Done being blamed. Done being bullied. Done looking over my shoulder wondering what the next thing would be and when it’s coming.
Small towns can be tough. And Oak Valley is no different.
The generations of loyalty, however misguided, alternately intrigue and sicken me.
It amazes me how the schoolyard antics extend to the adults.
Everyone weighs in, and it becomes a frenzied dog fight if you wrong one of theirs.
Sadly, I thought I was one or at least lived on the perimeter of the chosen ones.
It doesn’t matter now. I crossed a line.
Except I didn’t. I know I didn’t. But it didn’t matter.
The thing about being a chosen one is you get to tell the story, and no one disputes the telling.
One thing I can say about Blue Lake is it’s beautiful and remote, the perfect place to disappear.
Okay, that’s three things. But I’d love to do just that—disappear.
I’d prefer to go back to being the invisible bookworm I’ve been most of my life, and this town where no one knows me, and I know no one except Allie, might be the perfect place to do it.
And the scenery doesn’t suck. What does suck is not knowing.
Not knowing what to expect, what comes next, where I fit in.
I feel calmer when I can plan for every possible scenario.
For now, staring out the wall of windows overlooking the glass surface of the lake beyond Allie’s backyard is allowing me to breathe.
Really breathe. For the first time in months.
I can’t remember the last time I didn’t wake up and forget for just a second before it all came crashing back through my mind.
The weight didn’t settle on my chest until I felt like I was suffocating.
Here, I can go outside without looking over my shoulder.
Although I won’t be going back to school, but I was over school anyway.
It’s not how I envisioned finishing my senior year, but Dr. Franklin made a call.
I’ll finish my senior year remotely through Blue Lake High School.
I think I’ll like it—remote learning. My anxiety likes it already.
And everyone agrees this is the best option for all of us.
All of us being me, my sister and my mom.
Even Allie, who’s never lived with a kid twenty-four seven, likes the idea of gaining a helper.
I decide to be as invisible as possible and as helpful as possible when I’m not invisible. Like now.
I take a deep breath before I head downstairs to greet her and start my first day of work. I take one last look around my new room. Bed made. Clothes picked up. It looks like no one lives here. A perfect military brat. With another deep breath, I step into the hallway and close the door.
***
“Morning, Evvie. How’d you sleep?” Allie leans against the far counter in the kitchen and sips from the steaming mug in her hand.
She’s what I’d guess regular people call granola.
Even though she owns and operates the local fitness center, not exactly granola, she’s equally committed to the outdoors and the earth.
Maybe it’s more accurate to say she’s a health nut.
Whatever the label, she oozes it from every pore.
She has that glow people talk about in commercials.
Her skin is tan even coming off winter. Her hair shines even twisted into a knot on top of her head.
And she looks like someone in her twenties instead of her early forties.
“Great. Thanks. It’s so quiet here,” I answer with the cheeriest smile plastered on my face.
The truth is the quiet is deafening. And because it’s so quiet, every little rustle of leaves pierces like thunder.
I lay motionless and wide awake most of the night pondering if even turning over in bed might be heard down the hall.
“Are you a coffee drinker? Tea? I know tea is supposed to be the healthier option, but coffee will always be the nectar of the gods.” Allie holds up her cup in a salute.
“Uh, coffee would be great, thanks. I can get it, though. Where are the cups?”
She hands me one she’s already removed from the cupboard for me and I fill it from the urn on the counter and take a quick sip. The bitterness stings my tongue and throat. I take another.
Allie watches me for a moment like she wants to say something.
She doesn’t. She simply flows past me and out of the kitchen.
At the bottom of the stairs, she turns and says, “We’ll be heading to the fitness club in thirty minutes.
Meet me back down here then, okay? And there’s cream and sugar if you don’t like it black. ”
I don’t like it black, but I drink it that way to come off as low maintenance.
I wander around the kitchen for a minute getting my bearings.
She left some quick-grab breakfast out, beyond healthy no doubt.
I peruse my choices suspiciously, opt for just the coffee today and head back upstairs to get my shit together.
Allie is great though, breakfast choices aside.
She’s like the cool aunt who doesn’t treat you like a kid because she never had kids of her own.
And she is. Cool, that is. She’s my mom’s oldest friend and lives in what’s known as the foothills below the Sierra Mountains of Northern California, about an hour’s drive from Oak Valley, the town I lived in my whole life.
She runs a fitness studio and lives in this sprawling house that overlooks Blue Lake.
Her whole existence is a chill, Zen state of being.
Why she’s agreed to take me in is beyond me.
Lately, I seem to be a magnet for whatever the opposite of Zen is.
But she and my mom are more like sisters than friends, and she considers us family.
More so than her own that I’ve never met and seldom hear her speak of.
So maybe that’s why. Or maybe she’s just that nice.
Either way, I’m here, in her space, trying to piece my life back together.
Here goes nothing, Ev. Adulting, here I come.
The thing is, I’m not exactly an adult. Eighteen last month, so technically I guess I’m an adult, but I feel like a kid pretending to be an adult.
I wasn’t quite ready to strike out on my own.
Not exactly on my own here, but not exactly not on my own.
I’ve left the only home I’ve ever known to live in the middle of nowhere, skipped months of my senior year to go remote, and now take a job in my mom’s best friend’s fitness studio and essentially disappear from my life as I know it.
I’m not even sure what the job will entail or what I am even qualified to do, but she agreed to give me one, so I guess I’ll be grateful instead of feeling sorry for myself.
Besides, I chose this. To disappear and start over.
I don’t care about all the senior year rituals or all the first lasts.
Okay, losing the valedictorian thing makes me a little bitter—mostly because that suck-up mathlete, Eli Tran, would get it.
Everyone knows math is inferior to literature.
His speech will probably suck too. I shake my head at the train of my negative spiral.
Eli is a nice guy. I don’t begrudge him his glory.
I left by choice. And I don’t need the coveted valedictorian status anyway with my college plans now up in the air.
Fuck, what is my life right now?
The weight of it all has me feeling like the oldest eighteen-year-old on the planet.
And feeling old is not new to me. A new level, sure.
But I’m stubbornly ready for it. Proving haters wrong is a great motivator.
Though they’ll never know if I succeed or not.
They’ll never see me again, God willing.
An introverted homebody, I’ve always been an easy target.
I tried to bond with girls my age, but it wouldn’t be long before I said something that caused the blank stares and eventual ghosting.
Dubbed a brainiac since preschool didn’t exactly help me blend in.
Speaking fluent movie, TV and book quotes since puberty for them to fall on ignorant ears got me mocked and avoided.
So I mostly quit trying. I decided that being uninterested in them before they could become uninterested in me felt better.
But I wasn’t without my uses. Some of the more popular girls my age had been asking me to write poems for their boyfriends since seventh grade when I got called on to read one out loud in English class.
They were also willing to pay for it. And .
. . my accidental, super-secret Cyrano-esque side hustle was born.
Of course, it came with all the threats of ruining me if I didn’t swear to absolute secrecy.
What did I care? Not gonna lie, I low-key ate up the idea of their boyfriends catching feelings over something I wrote.
And writing gave me all the feels, so win-win.