Excerpt: Catch Me, I'm Falling Too Fast

Whoever said that love was easy, lied. Clearly they had never been a teenager, and clearly they’d never had a boy that they loved be a jerk to them. Not that I’d been in love before… No, that wasn’t the case. It was just that the feelings I thought might have been love were always crushed. Crushed in the hands of those whom I “loved”.

Every guy I’d ever liked, from my first crush (Hunter in first grader) to my last (Jason Luttrell from church) had disappointed me. Ultimately, they’d all ended up idiots or jerks, or both for that matter. I hadn’t ever met a guy that had a mentality like me. I’d never met a guy that cared for the same things that I did. Actually, it was difficult to find a teenager that I could fully relate to, period.

See, I’m what my parents would call an “abnormal teenager”. Or, at least I was. Before I had turned sixteen I was never on the phone. Maybe once a week with my best friend for advice, but otherwise, I never talked on the phone. Email was more my thing.

I never texted. Maybe a couple of times here or there – specifically my cousin across the country in California – but generally I didn’t do that. I had to pay for my own minutes, and I felt that, honestly, they were kind of a waste of money.

I didn’t ever really go out. I preferred to stay home and read books or play video games. I was the kind of girl that didn’t mind if I only saw my friends more then a couple of times a week. I didn’t care if I went to sleepovers, or had them. I didn’t think that I would care if I ended up a loner. I was perfectly content with my books.

Despite all of that, I did have really great friends that I loved to hang out with. It wasn’t like I was completely anti-social. No, when I was with my friends I had a lot of fun, and I enjoyed it. I just wouldn’t necessarily have cared if I’d gone to do different things, otherwise.

Kaitlyn Mitchell had to be one of my best friends of all time. I called her Kate for short. Most people did, except for her mom and dad. Sometimes they called her Katie, but mostly they just called her Kaitlyn.

Kate and I had been best friends for years. At this point, it was probably over a decade that we’d known each other. Our mothers had been best friends in high school, and we were carrying that on through our lives.

She’d been my first best friend when I’d moved to Georgia. We went to the same church, had lived close-by when I’d first arrived here, and were always together when we were younger because our mothers were so close. We loved each other dearly.

Time passed. In the moment, it seemed like it was going by all too slowly, but once it was gone, it seemed like it had gone too quickly. We gradually went from being six-year-olds to both of us nearly being sixteen. Our parents had decided that we’d have this rule where we weren’t allowed to date until we were both sixteen-years-old. Of course, we kind of complained here and there about it when we had crushes, but ultimately it didn’t matter to us. We didn’t really care, considering we felt no need or want to date, yet. Yet was the keyword that my mom always pointed out. I knew the truth in this statement. I knew that soon enough I would want to date.

Little did I know that as soon as I could date my world would take a strange turn and my friendships would be tried. This is where my story begins.