1
Caroline
I roll over in bed and stretch. I need to get up. I can hear Gia singing to herself in the shower and it makes me smile. She loves to sing but she’s terrible at it. She’s worse than I am and that’s saying a lot. That still didn’t stop her from making us do the seventh grade talent show together, where we not only danced but sang too. It was awful, but thank god at the time we went to an all-girls school together back in Seattle or it might have been more embarrassing. She really could talk me into almost anything.
I would have done the talent show every year with her if it would’ve kept her from moving all the way to Chicago in the middle of our eighth grade year. We stayed close, but high school would’ve been better if she was by my side.
I throw the blankets back and get up to go make some coffee. I don’t drink the stuff, but Gia swears by it. I put on my slippers and snag my phone off the side table before opening my bedroom door at the same time as Gia comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Her dark hair is hidden under a towel on her head.
“Hey, I wanted to give you a heads up.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “It rained last night.”
The same dog that pretends he can’t hear me when I call his name almost knocks me over as he comes flying out of my room where he was hiding under my blankets. He was next to me all night and tried to kick me out of the bed.
“Elvis, no!” I take off after him, but somehow the dog who moves at a snail’s pace—unless you drop food—is faster than ever and leaps with his short stubby legs onto the sofa, pushing the curtains out of the way. He looks out the window to see if it rained and I groan.
“Sorry!” Gia yells from the hallway.
Elvis turns and his big ears bounce as he plops down on the sofa and gives me a look that says he will not be walking today.
“You have to go out for at least one walk,” I tell my stubborn dog.
I’m pretty sure he’s a mix between a basset hound and bulldog. He was a rescue Yana and I found and I love the little brat, partly because he reminds me of her. I lost the woman who I considered my mom six months ago. People say time helps heal, but I don’t feel like anything has changed yet. At least now I’m back with Gia and that helps.
“He’s the stupidest, smartest dog I’ve ever seen.” Gia comes back into the living room a few moments later in a pair of jeans and hoodie that reads “Northwestern University.” “Are you sure he isn’t basset hound and bulldog with a touch of cat?”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
He acts like a cat most of the time. He’s allergic to water unless it’s to drink. He gets pissy if his long ears fall into his water bowl and if they do, he stands in front of me and paws at me until I get a towel and dry them off. It’s adorably annoying.
“I was going to start the coffee,” I tell her while trying to give Elvis a hard look of warning. He lets out a huff before getting up and pawing at the sofa and turning in circles. Once he’s good and ready, he plops down and sighs.
“Marco is picking me up. He said he already got me one.” She smiles for a moment then stops. “Makeup.”
She dashes back to her bedroom to get ready before her boyfriend gets here. At least I think he’s her boyfriend. I haven’t heard any titles put out there yet, but he acts like she’s all his.
It’s adorable watching the two of them together. I don’t have much to go off myself because my parents didn’t have a marriage of love. Seeing something like they had growing up never made me crave a relationship. Being in an all-girls school didn’t push the issue either. It wasn’t until my first year of college that I tried to see what could be out there. Johnny Rule was my first boyfriend, if you could even call him that. He had me slamming the door in the face of dating rather quickly.
Then life happened and dating was so far from my mind, but seeing Marco and Gia has me wondering what I might be missing out on. Yana always said I was meant for a great love and that one day I would have it and it would be nothing like my parents’. She told me that weeks before she died when I told her I’d never fall in love. She made me promise that I wouldn’t lock my heart away because it would only make me more like my parents. She was right, but then again she always was.