Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 69534 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69534 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
“That sounds messy,” I said.
The next ten minutes of our thirty-minute phone call consisted of what theme we were looking for, what the timeline was looking like for the series that she wanted done, and a few other things.
When we finally rang off, I looked at the clock and realized that I needed to go to bed soon or I’d be too tired to open the stupid diner in the morning.
Morning rush was my least favorite, and usually the one that my mother did because she knew I’d just as soon not come in if I had to open in the mornings.
But since my mother still wasn’t home—something that she did from time to time so I wasn’t too worried yet—I had to pay the bills. And paying the bills required me to get my ass up and get to work.
Unluckily for Kent, he’d seen how tired I was and had offered to work with me this summer. Which in turn meant that Anders had to be there, too.
Not that I felt too badly about it.
I’d spent my entire childhood in those four grimy walls, and I’d made it out okay.
Anders would survive spending her summer there, even if she didn’t like it.
Letting her control the TV above the windows helped.
Thoughts of my childhood followed me into sleep, where I stayed for a solid four hours before I woke up out of a dead sleep.
When I glanced at the clock, I realized that it was well past two in the morning and I hadn’t heard Calliope come back in for the night.
Stomach now in knots just thinking about my little sister, I sat up in bed and reached for my laptop, thinking that if I was going to be awake and worrying, I might as well spend my time wisely.
I didn’t bother to call her or check her location.
She’d disabled the location thing a long time ago when she’d caught me snooping on her whereabouts.
Calling her was just as useless because she sure the fuck wouldn’t answer the phone if I called.
That’d been something she stopped doing when she turned fifteen and decided that I was the worst person on the planet.
Teens were so much fun.
I was about halfway through the first layer, working on font and sizing for the title, when my phone rang on the bedside table.
I didn’t bother to look at the ID, knowing that it was her.
“Calliope,” I said quietly, hoping that my talking wouldn’t wake Kent and Anders.
My room split theirs, and the walls were paper thin.
“Can you come pick me up?” Calliope sounded pissed.
Whether it was because she was calling me for a ride or something else, I would probably never know.
There was only so much I’d ever get out of Calliope. She was overly protective of her privacy, and what little she did give me left me with more questions than answers.
I wasn’t sure if normal teenage girls were like this.
Hell, I remembered being mad at the world myself at that age. But I didn’t have the luxury of withdrawing like she did. I had three kids to help raise.
“Where?” I asked, forcing myself not to ask her what was wrong.
She’d clam up if I did that. Possibly tell me to fuck off and she didn’t need a ride after all.
“I’ll send you my location,” she muttered.
She did in the next moment, but I knew from experience that it would only be for an hour.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said as I got a good look at her location.
A part of town that I’d never been to before. Hell, it likely wasn’t in Decatur at all, but all the app showed me was directions, not a specific address.
Sighing, I got up and slipped into my clothes from the night before—a white wife beater tank top, cutoff shorts from my favorite pair of jeans that I’d worn the inside of the thighs out on, and a pair of flip-flops that I’d gotten at Walgreens for a dollar in the clearance section—and headed out.
My anger only rose the further I had to drive to get her.
The houses went from shitty—ours—to not shitty in the blink of an eye.
The closer you got to suburbs surrounding Dallas, the better looking the houses got until you were in a subdivision that probably cost a cool million to own.
I slowed my car and pulled over when the streetlights started to turn on.
When one door that I’d stopped in front of actually opened, I turned the car around and parked at the entrance to the subdivision.
Then, I decided…fuck it.
Fuck these guys and their nice houses.
I’d pull my shitty ass car that was in serious need of a muffler right up to this house and they could kiss my ass.
I pulled another bitch and went back past the houses that I’d just woken, right to the house that my sister was now prissily standing in front of.