Amber smiles at her and Venice smiles back, "Oh, that's nice. Nice to meet you."
Her cheeks are slightly flushed and I smile. "What are you doing here?" she asks.
Amber smiles at me and says to her, "Shopping! We're new here, and I wanted to
check out the stores in this mall." She smiles, "Well stocked for such a small town!"
Venice smiles and nods. "I heard there's a theater here?" I ask Venice. She nods,
"Yea, on the west side." Amber looks over at Abercrombie and Fitch and her face
lights up. I look at Venice, "You wanna see something? I'm sick of shopping." She
blushes, "Um, thanks, but I was actually just gonna head home..." I shrug, "OK, some
other time." She smiles and nods, walking toward the exit doors. "I'm gonna see a
movie anyway," I tell Amber. She shrugs and walks off.
I pick up Amber outside the theater after the movie ends and we drive back home.
Amber runs into the house, saying something about not wanting to miss some show. I
sigh as I park my Jeep and get out, swinging the keys around my index finger as I walk
out of the garage. I see something hanging from a tree in the distance and pocket my
keys, walking toward it to figure out was it is.
When I reach the big oak tree, I discover a tire swing. I smile and run my hand over
the worn out rope, remembering making tire swings when I was a little boy back in
England. I look down and am surprised to see a pond, hiding under the small hill the oak
tree sits upon. I smile at the tire swing, knowing exactly what its for, and walk up to the
top of the hill, wondering who might have lived here before.
"Russel?"
"Who is this?" I ask, looking through a stack of papers to find a recipe for peach cobbler with
one hand and holding the house phone up to my ear with the other. "Abby." I drop the pile
down on my hand and then breath in and continue to search through the pile. "Hi, Abby."
"Hey. Um, so, I was...just wondering, you know, how your new house, and school, and
everything is?" I pull out the purple sheet of paper with the recipe written on it and reply,
coldly, "Its fine. Why are you calling me, Abby?"
"Um...I just wanted to see how you're doing."
"I'm fine. Is that it?"
"Um...yea, I guess."
"Ok. Bye." Abby sighs, "Bye, Russel." I hang up and walk back into the kitchen. "Who was that?"
Stacy asks, taking the recipe from my hand and opening the fridge, pulling out the listed
ingredients. "Abby." She turns abruptly, "Stella?" I nod. She sucks in a breath, "Wow." She
turns back toward the counter and says, as she started to peel a peach, "What a snake."
"Tell me about it," I sigh, pouring flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and milk into a bowl. "What
are you guys doing?" Amber asks as she comes downstairs. "Making peach cobbler," I reply.
"Mm! Can I help?"
"Sure. Come on."
I sit at the kitchen table, eating the peach cobbler with my dad and Kenny, and stare at
the wall in front of me, thinking of Abby. Most people considered her as a kind of prize
girlfriend. She was one of those people whose ex-boyfriends would say to people, "Yea, I dated
her," and instantly gain respect. But I never saw her that way. Sure, she was gorgeous. But that
wasn't why I liked her. In fact, her popularity and, frankly, ego, was a turn-off for me. But when
I started to get to know her better, I thought I saw something there, something that no one else
ever saw. She seemed to be, underneath all her make up and brand name clothes, an actually
cool person. I went out with her for five months, all along thinking she really was a good
person, and then she dumped me for a new guy with a higher social status. I was shocked and
crushed. I had thought that I was falling in love, and she crushed me. I wondered afterward how
I could have fallen for all of her schemes. It seems to me I had been in love with my idea of her
rather than the actual her. She wasn't my first heartbreak, but she was the most painful.
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