Prologue
I was eight years old the first time I realized there was a difference between me and everyone else.
Elizabeth’s house always smelled like cookies and dryer sheets, warm, sweet, and safe in a way that clung to you long after you left. My backpack, too big for my small shoulders and fraying at the seams, slid halfway down my arm as I shuffled up her front steps.
The door was unlocked, like it always was. I pushed it open carefully, pausing to wipe my sneakers on the mat, even though they were already scuffed and cracked from too many hand-me-down miles.
Elizabeth was in the kitchen, her hair in a messy ponytail, a smear of chocolate across her cheek as she leaned over the counter. She was making cookies again, because that’s what Elizabeth did after school. Her family had a pantry full of things just waiting to be baked into something warm and perfect.
“Skylar!” She turned around, her grin wide and welcoming, the kind of grin that made me forget, for just a moment, that my socks didn’t match and my shirt had once belonged to someone else.
“Hi,” I said, clutching the straps of my backpack.
“You’re just in time. First batch is almost out of the oven. Want to help me frost them?”
“Yes, please.”
I started to toe off my shoes by the door when a voice cut down the hallway.
“Nice shirt, Sky. Did Goodwill have a sale?”
My head jerked up.
Alex Mercer stood at the end of the hallway, a basketball tucked under his arm, his hair falling into his eyes. He wasn’t angry. He never looked angry. Just smug, like he knew something I didn’t, like I was the punchline to a joke I’d never be in on.
Heat flooded my cheeks. My hand flew to smooth my shirt, the one Mom said was “basically new” because the stain on the collar “wasn’t that noticeable.”
Elizabeth whirled on him, sharp as only she could be. “Alex,” she snapped, “shut up or go back to your house, you stink anyways.”
“What?” He shrugged, all fake innocence. “It’s just a shirt.”
I forced a smile I didn’t feel, my voice thinner than I wanted when I said, “It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine.
The next few years blurred together in flashes, like home videos on fast-forward.
Summer afternoons in the Mercers’ backyard, Elizabeth and I sprawled on the grass, whispering secrets about the boys in our class while the sun baked our skin. Alex and his twin, Oak, shooting hoops in the driveway, calling out teasing comments we pretended to ignore.
Except for me. Ignoring Alex had always been impossible.
“You gonna sit there all summer, Sky, or are you gonna do something useful?”
“You’re gonna trip over those flip-flops one day, you know. Not that it’d make a difference, you can’t run to save your life.”
It was never outright cruel. Just sharp enough to stick, to make me swallow hard and remind myself to keep my head down.
I tagged along with Elizabeth everywhere, because her house felt like a safe place. My own house... not so much. At home, money was always tight, voices always raised, and sometimes dinner was cereal because that’s all we had. At Elizabeth’s, there was always food on the table and laughter in the air.
But there was also Alex.
By the time we were twelve, I’d learned how to stay invisible when he was around.
He’d breeze past me in the hallway without so much as a glance, unless he had something to say. And when he did, it was always something that dug just deep enough to leave a mark.
“Those shoes again, Sky? What, they didn’t have any in your size at the thrift store?”
Or, worse, “You really should let Liz do your hair before school dances. You might actually get someone to notice you.”
Elizabeth always jumped to my defense. She’d glare at him and tell him to grow up. Sometimes Oak would roll his eyes and mutter at his twin to shut up.
But it didn’t matter.
The sting always lingered.
I remembered one afternoon more than the rest.
I was maybe thirteen. Elizabeth and I were sprawled out on the ground in the Mercer’s backyard, with music playing too loud from the little stereo in the corner. Elizabeth had insisted that she wanted to jump on their trampoline, and promised that Alex wouldn’t be there. Oak had told her that he had soccer practice that afternoon.
“Why is she always here?”
It was Alex.
“Because she’s Elizabeth's cousin. They're close,” Alex’s stepmom said, her voice sharp.
“She’s always hanging around, eating our food, using our Wi-Fi -”
“She’s a kid, Alex. Stop being an ass.”
A pause, then his voice again, quieter but crueler somehow. “She only hangs around because her family’s a mess and she wants free stuff here.”
My breath caught. My hands froze in Elizabeth’s hair, the braid I’d been twisting slipping loose.
I waited, praying she’d say something, anything, to shut him up. But the silence stretched too long, and shame burned hot and heavy in my chest.
I didn’t wait for Elizabeth to notice. I mumbled something about forgetting my backpack at her house and bolted, my cheeks hot, my throat tight.
By the time I reached her room, I’d promised myself one thing: Alex Mercer would never, ever see me break again.
I stayed away for almost two weeks after that. Elizabeth called me every day, leaving voicemails on the landline when I didn’t answer. I let them pile up, telling myself it was better this way. Better not to have to sit in her perfect kitchen with its spotless countertops and bowls of fresh fruit while Alex lounged nearby, ready with another smirk or another comment that sliced through my skin like paper cuts.
If only the Mercers would move far far away, maybe then I would be spared from his presence.
When I finally went back, nothing had changed on the surface. Elizabeth threw her arms around me like no time had passed, chattering about everything I’d missed. Oak asked if I wanted to shoot hoops, even though I was terrible and he knew it.
And Alex?
Alex barely looked at me.
Maybe that should have been a relief. But it wasn’t. Not when I could still hear his voice from that day, low and certain, accusing me of using the only family that had ever made me feel safe.
I built walls after that. Quiet ones. I laughed when I was supposed to, joined in their games when Elizabeth begged, but I stopped lingering in the kitchen, stopped letting myself imagine that their house was mine, too.
By high school, I was good at pretending.
Elizabeth bloomed early, tall, confident, the kind of girl who could smile at anyone and make them feel seen. She pulled me along in her orbit whether I wanted her to or not, dragging me to football games, bonfires, late-night runs to the diner.
I learned how to blend in, to smile when people made comments about my thrifted jeans or the fact that my phone was two models behind everyone else’s.
Alex never said much by then. Not out loud, anyway.
But every once in a while, I’d catch him watching me, something sharp and unreadable in his eyes before he looked away.
There was one night, a party at one of Oak’s friends’ houses, that stuck with me for years.
I had borrowed a dress from Elizabeth, one that made me feel almost pretty, if I didn’t think too hard about the fact that it wasn’t mine. We’d been standing in the kitchen, talking to a group of her friends, when Alex walked in with Oak and a couple of the guys from the basketball team.
His gaze swept the room, landed on me, and something cold slid down my spine.
“Didn’t realize they opened the party up to charity cases,” he said casually, like he was commenting on the weather.
The room went silent.
Elizabeth gasped, ready to jump in, but I got there first. I smiled, sharp and brittle. “Don’t worry, Alex. I’m not staying. Wouldn’t want to bring down the property value.”
And then I left, head high as if I hadn’t just been gutted.
I cried that night, in Elizabeth’s room with the door locked and the lights off, silent tears soaking her pillow so she wouldn’t hear.
That was the night I promised myself, again, that Alex Mercer would never see me weak.
After that, I avoided him whenever I could.
It got easier as we got older. He was busy with school and basketball, then with whatever job he worked after graduation. I went to college out of state, throwing myself into classes and part-time jobs to pay for everything I couldn’t afford. Distance helped dull the sharp edges of the memories, but it never erased them.
Every time I came home for a holiday or a weekend visit, there he was, taller, broader, older, but still Alex. Still sharp-edged, still unreadable.
Sometimes he ignored me completely. Sometimes he nodded in quiet acknowledgment, like we were nothing more than acquaintances. And once, during a Christmas party when the house was too loud and I was too tired to keep up the walls, he pressed a mug of hot cocoa into my hands without looking at me and muttered, “You look cold.”
I didn’t know what to do with that.
So I did what I’d always done.
I said nothing.
Looking back, those years were a patchwork of warmth and hurt.
Elizabeth was the constant, my safe place, my person, the one who reminded me that not everyone saw me as something to be pitied or dismissed.
But Alex was the thread that stitched through everything, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it. He was the boy who’d called me out, cut me down, and, sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, done small, quiet things that didn’t fit the version of him I carried in my head.
I told myself those moments didn’t matter. That they didn’t mean anything.
But they did.
Authors note
Please vote :) Updates will be posted on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Follow me for updates.
The completed book is available on Patreon! I have lots of other books also in progress there :)
Join here: https://www.patreon.com/JessieGrayWrites
