[Realistic young adult fiction] By Heart - first chapter

CHAPTER ONE

The porch in front of my home is my favorite place to sit, when the weather is just right and someone down the street is barbecuing. My neighborhood is just old enough that porches are still stretching out from the rectangular wood houses, but as I watch my friends all move out of the old neighborhoods and into the new, I see that porches are no longer so much of a necessity as a bother. Personally I am glad that my parents are fine where they are, thanks. I shuffle my feet on the worn wood beneath me and swing gently with these thoughts settling in my head, the chains holding me up speaking aloud.

The air is humid and uncomfortable. Summer vacation is screeching to a terrible halt as the prospect of my last year of high school looms just over the two-week hill ahead of me. I take a swig of my cold soda and watch some children ride their bicycles down the street. As soon as senior year comes, it’s going to be all hell, all the time. But not necessarily the bad kind of hell.

I bet you didn’t know there was a good kind of hell, did you?

Not only will I be frantically preparing for college for the entire year, as is required by the school administrators, but I will also be quitting any efforts to secure a job in order to make room for what every senior in high school should be focusing on: football games, homecoming, barbecuing, bonfires in the fall; basketball, prom, dating, and more barbecuing in the spring semester. The opportunities for senior/freshmen drama abound, and so I can only look forward to the coming year, despite knowing that I will be spending it sans lifelong best friend.

My mind wanders from high school to my ex best friend, where it slams into a wall as I find myself gazing over the railing at the plot of grassless, weed-diseased soil that forms a rectangle next to the stairs and in front of the porch. A rosebush wilts in the corner, a few brown roses hanging their heads in mourning, or pain, and several more dead bulbs littering the ground. Then I glance at my wristwatch, giving my head a shake to clear it of those thoughts, and watch until the second hand ticks all of the way to the 12, making it exactly six o’clock in the evening. A short, high-pitched horn beeps as a car approaches my home. Right on time, I think. An old double-cab Toyota truck screeches to a halt in front of my mailbox. It’s a Saturday night; the second to last Saturday night of my last real summer, and two of my friends are ready to cram me into that little Tacoma, ready to show the town that we own the streets, at least while school is still held at bay.

My friends tumble out of the truck and amble up to my porch. I take another swig of my soda and wave to them.

“Whose house tonight?” I call out to them. Sophie, the youngest of us, is the first to answer.

“David’s,” she says, clapping her hands together in her over-excited and often extremely annoying way. “No way can we go anywhere else. This is his last party before he leaves. We have to go.”

I nod. There’s no arguing that David’s parties are the absolute best, and the party circuit just won’t be the same without him. Not that I know personally, but my friends do. I’d only ambled through a few parties for most of the summer, but recently began hanging out with a new crowd that sucked me into the party scene like I’d always been there. I’ve quickly become accustomed to my new self: confident, flashy, and enjoyable. Francesca, the owner of the loved Tacoma truck, approaches. She is dragging a suitcase behind her. We move through my house with an easy gait and when we arrive in my bedroom, Francesca drops the suitcase onto my bed with an airy puh.

For a moment we gaze at it as if it is a god. Then we viciously unzip it and, behold, our best party clothes are all folded neatly within it. It had taken about a week for me to look up some friends that I had only known superficially the year before, and for them to turn me into what they are. Adaptation in order to survive any crushing loneliness is perhaps the most valuable thing I’ve learned in high school. I take the extra hangers from my closet and we hang the clothes wherever we can find a hook: on door handles, the window frame, the bookshelf, the dresser. On my vanity, Francesca and Sophie dump their own makeup on it, mixing with my own. Of course, this means we don’t really know who originally owned the makeup, we just try to claim the best before the others do when the night is over. Soon my room is wallpapered in flashy and daring clothes and my vanity looks like CoverGirl and Seventeen Magazine have attacked it

“What look are you envisioning for tonight, Liz?” asks Francesca perkily. She always enjoys the dress up event before a party. I shrug and don’t say anything as I gaze at the clothes as well, not really sure what I want but not really worried, either. Usually, an outfit will jump out at me suddenly, as if I were destined to wear it that particular night, to that particular party, or parties, as it sometimes is. I smiled:

“I guess we’ll just have to try *everything* on.”

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“You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're gonna get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. Like maybe you survive.”