The Elements Series Complete Box Set

by Brittainy Cherry

  She put the car in drive, and kept driving for a long, long time. We didn’t talk the whole way, and I wasn’t sure what exactly she was up to. When the car pulled over to the side of an abandoned road, my confusion grew.

  “Seriously. What are we doing?”

  “Come on,” she said, hurrying out of the car, and running down the road. This girl was going to be the death of me—and by death I meant life. Because of her coming into my life, I somehow found freedom from my life’s restraints each day.

  I followed after her, because whenever she moved, I wondered where she was going.

  She stood in front of a ladder leading up to a billboard. “Tada!” she screamed, dancing with excitement.

  “Umm?”

  “It’s your birthday present, silly!”

  “My present is…a billboard ladder?”

  She rolled her eyes and dramatically sighed. “Follow me,” she said, climbing up the ladder. I did as she told me.

  We climbed up the highest ladder I’d ever come across. The large billboard that we sat in front of read, “2 for 5 Burgers from Hungry Harry’s Diner.” I could tell Alyssa was a bit afraid of heights, because she kept trying her best to avoid looking down. There was a railing that wrapped around the billboard to keep us from freefalling, but still, it seemed too high for her liking.

  “You’re a little scared?” I asked, learning something new.

  “Um, maybe? I think heights are one of those things you don’t know you’re terrified of until you’re…up high. Anyway.” She slowly walked around to the side of the billboard and pulled out a picnic basket and wrapped gifts. “Here you go. Open the gifts first.”

  I did as she told me, and I almost broke down when I saw the presents. “I wasn’t sure which one it was that you watched with your grandpa, so I got all of the DVDs I could find,” she explained. I held over twelve DVDs on the galaxy, and the documentary that I watched with Grandpa was amongst the pile.

  “Jesus,” I murmured, pinching the bridge of my nose.

  “And,” she waved up to the sky. “This is the best view I could find for seeing the stars at night. I drove around town for days trying to find a spot. I know it’s probably dumb, but I thought you’d enjoy the view.” She frowned. “It’s dumb, isn’t it? I should have done something better. The past two years I did so well, and I just thought that this would be…”

  I grabbed her hand.

  She went silent.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, brushing my free hand against my eyes. I sniffled a bit and nodded. “Thank you.”

  “You love it?”

  “I love it.”

  I’m falling in love with you…

  Shaking my head, I tried to run that thought away.

  I couldn’t love her. Love meant pain. And she was one of the only two good things in my life.

  I looked back to the sky. “If you look out there, you can see the Scorpius constellation. Each month, you can see some constellations better than others. It starts with that lower star, curves up, and then splits off into five points, making it look kind of like a dandelion. Antares is the brightest star in the constellation. Grandpa used to tell me it was the heart of the Scorpius. Do you see it?” I asked, pointing. She nodded. “The myth behind it is that Orion, the hunter, was boasting that he could kill all animals on the planet. He was defeated by a scorpion, and Zeus noticed the battle take place. Therefore, he raised the scorpion to the night sky for eternity.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, staring at her, staring up. “It is.”

  “That’s beautiful, too,” she said.

  “What’s beautiful?”

  Her lips turned up as she kept watching the stars. “The way you stare at me when you think I’m not looking.”

  My heart skipped once.

  She noticed me staring?

  “Do you ever stare my way?”

  She nodded slow. “And then when we aren’t together, I close my eyes, and I see you in my mind. That’s the moment when I never feel alone.”

  I’m falling in love with you.

  I wanted to open my mouth and tell her those words. I wanted to let her into my soul and tell her the stories of how I daydreamed about her. Then I remembered who she was, and who I was and why I couldn’t say those words.

  The awkward silence stayed until Alyssa helped move it along.

  “Oh! I also made a late-late night dinner for us,” she exclaimed, reaching for the picnic basket. “Now, I don’t want you to be offended by how amazing my food is. I know you’re used to being the best chef in town, but I think I might have topped you with this one.”

  She reached into the basket and pulled out a container holding peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I laughed. “No way! You made this?”

  “Fully from scratch. Except for the peanut butter, jam, and bread. That was all from the grocery store.”

  My best friend, folks.

  I bit into the sandwich. “Mixed berry jam?”

  “Mixed berry jam.”

  “Well aren’t you fancy?”

  She smiled. And I died a little.

  “For dessert, I have a package of raspberries, and these.” She pulled out a package of Oreos. “I went all out, didn’t I? Here.” She picked up a cookie, untwisted it, placed a raspberry inside, and put it back together. Then, she proceeded to fly it around like an airplane by my mouth. I opened wide, took a bit, and moaned.

  She cocked an eyebrow, pleased. “Are you moaning over my cookies?”

  “I’m definitely moaning over your cookies.”

  She shimmied, and sighed dramatically. “If I had a dollar for every time a guy told me that.”

  “You’d have one dollar and zero cents.”

  She flipped me off, and I fell more for her. I couldn’t decide what I wanted more, her lips against mine, or her words. The idea of both entertained me more than I ever thought they could.

  Words, go with words. “What’s your biggest dream?” I asked, tossing a few raspberries into my mouth, before throwing a few into hers.

  “Biggest dream?”

  “Yeah. What do you want to be or do in the future?”

  She bit her bottom lip. “I want to play the piano and make people smile. Make people happy. I know it sounds little to a lot of people, like my mom. And I know it sounds like a stupid goal, but that’s what I want. I want my music to inspire people.”

  “You can do it, Alyssa. You are already doing it.” I believed in her dream more than I could ever say. Whenever I heard her play the piano, it was as if all of the terrible parts of life kind of melted away. Her sounds made me find a few moments of peace.

  “What about you?” she asked, placing a raspberry between my lips. I wasn’t really in a life situation where I’d ever been able to dream, but when I was with Alyssa, all of that seemed a little more possible.

  “I want to be a chef. I want people to come in grumpy and leave happy because of what I put on their plate. I want people to feel good eating my food and forget all of the bullshit stuff going on in their real lives for a few minutes.”

  “I love that. We should open a restaurant, toss a piano inside, and call it the AlyLo.”

  “Or, LoAly,” I smirked.

  “AlyLo sounds much, much better. Plus, it was my idea.”

  “Well, let’s do it. Let’s open AlyLo and make amazing food and play amazing music, and live happily ever after.”

  “The end?”

  “The end.”

  “Pinky?” she asked, extending her finger toward me. I wrapped my pinky with hers.

  “Pinky.” Our hands kind of clasped together after that.

  “What’s another dream of yours?” she asked.

  I debated if I should tell her, because it seemed a little lame, but if there was anyone I trusted to not judge me, it was her. “I want to be a dad. I know that sounds stupid, but I really do. All my life I grew up with parents who didn’t know what it meant to love. But
if I were a dad, I’d loved them more than words could say. I’d show up to their baseball games, their dance recitals, and love them, regardless of if they wanted to be a lawyer or a garbage man. I’d be better than my parents.”

  “I know you would, Lo. You would be a great dad.”

  I don’t know why, but her saying that made my eyes tear up.

  We stayed up there for a while, not speaking one word, but solely looking up.

  It was still so peaceful up there. I couldn’t imagine anywhere else I’d rather be. We hadn’t stopped holding hands. Did she like holding my hand? Did her heart flip every few seconds? Was she kind of, sort of falling in love with me, too? I held her hand tighter. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to let go.

  “What’s your biggest fear?” she softly spoke.

  I pulled out my lighter and started flicking it on and off with my free hand. “Biggest fear? I don’t know. Something happening to the few people I care about. Kellan. You. My mom. What about you?”

  “Losing my dad. I know it sounds stupid, but each day, when the doorbell rings, I wonder if it’s him. Each time my phone goes off, my heart stops, hoping he’s calling me. I know these past few months he’s been a bit MIA, but I know he’s coming back. He always does. But the idea of losing him forever kind of breaks my heart.”

  We listened to each other’s darkness and we showed one another our light.

  “Tell me a beautiful memory about your mom,” she said.

  “Hmm…” I chewed on my bottom lip. “When I was seven, I walked to and from school each day. One day I came home and heard music blasting on the front porch of our old apartment building. Ma had a boom box playing oldies music—The Temptations, Journey, Michael Jackson, all of these classics. Ma said she got the CD from a neighbor, and it made her want to dance. So she had been dancing in the street, and she only moved to the sidewalk when a car came. She looked so beautiful that day, and made me dance with her all night until the moon was high. Kellan came over too. He rode his bike over because he’d had leftovers of his dinner that he’d bring for Ma and me. When he came all three of us danced.

  “I mean, looking back on it, I’m sure she was on something back then, but I couldn’t tell. I just remember laughing and spinning and dancing free with her and Kellan. The sound of her laugh was my favorite part because it was so loud, and wild. That’s my favorite family memory. That’s the memory that I go back to whenever she seems so far gone.”

  “That’s a good one to hold onto, Lo.”

  “Yeah.” I gave her a tight smile, never really letting anyone know how much I missed my mom, but knowing that she understood, because she missed her dad, too. “What’s a beautiful memory about your dad?”

  “You know the vinyl record player in my bedroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He got me that one year for Christmas, and we started the tradition that every night we’d listen and sing a song before I went to bed. Then, in the morning, we’d wake up and sing a song, too. Modern music, oldies, anything. It was our thing. Sometimes my sister Erika would come in and sing with us, sometimes Mom would yell for us to turn down the sounds, but we always laughed and smiled.”

  “Is that why there’s always music playing at night when I come to see you?”

  “Yeah. It’s funny how I play all the same songs that he and I used to, but now the lyrics all seem so different.”

  We kept the conversation going all night long.

  I fed her raspberries while she fed me her dreams.

  She fed me raspberries while I fed her my fears.

  We stared out at the night sky, feeling safe and free for a while.

  “Do you ever think about how insane people are?” I asked. “There are over three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Three hundred billion specks of light reminding us of all that is out there in the universe. Three hundred billion flames that look so small. Yet they are literally bigger than you could ever imagine. There are all these different galaxies, all these different worlds that we have never, and will never discover.

  “There’s so much wonder in the world, but instead of giving a damn, and taking the time to come to the realization that we are all very, very, small in a very, very miniature place, we like to pretend we are the alphas of the whole universe. We like to make ourselves feel big. And we each like to make our way seem like the best way, and our hurts seem like the biggest hurts, when really, we are nothing more than a tiny burning dot that makes up a part of the giant sky. A tiny dot that no one would even notice was missing. A tiny dot, that will soon enough be replaced by another speck which thinks it’s more important than it actually is. I just wish people would sometimes stop fighting about stupid mundane things like race, sexual orientation, and reality television. I wish they would remember how small they are and take five minutes a day to look up to the sky and breathe.”

  “Logan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love your mind.”

  “Alyssa?”

  “Yeah?”

  I’m falling in love with you…

  “Thanks for tonight. You have no clue how much I needed this. You have no clue how much I needed you.” I lightly squeezed her hand. “You’re my greatest high.”

  5

  Logan

  “Lo! Lo! Lo!” Alyssa screamed a week later, running toward me in the pouring rain. I was on the highest stair of the ladder, working on cleaning the third floor windows from the outside. Obviously Ma only asked me to clean them when it was pouring rain outside. Alyssa’s voice rattled me, making me send the bucket of water (which was mainly rain water) crashing to the ground.

  “God, Alyssa!” I shouted toward her.

  She gave me a slight frown, holding a bright yellow polka dot umbrella over her head. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Cleaning the windows.”

  “But it’s raining.”

  No shit, Sherlock, I thought to myself. But then I realized it wasn’t Alyssa’s fault that I was cleaning the windows and she didn’t deserve my bad attitude. I climbed down the steps of the ladder and stared at my friend. She took one large step toward me and held the umbrella over both of us.

  “Your mom made you do that?” she questioned with the saddest looking eyes I’d ever seen.

  I didn’t reply.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, slightly angered. I didn’t live in the kind of place that Alyssa did. I lived in a shit neighborhood, and it wasn’t the safest place for any person, especially someone like Alyssa. There was a basketball court down the street where more drug deals happened than games. There were the individuals who stood on the street corners from morning to night, hustling each other, trying to make an extra buck. There were the prostitutes who walked up and down the streets, strung out. And there were the gun shots that were always heard, but luckily I never saw them hit any targets.

  I hated this place. These streets. These people.

  And I hated that Alyssa showed up here sometimes.

  She blinked a few times as if she’d forgotten her reason for coming over.

  “Oh yeah!” she said, her frown turning into a full blown grin. “Ass-Crack called me! I wanted him to come to my piano recital tonight, but he didn’t call me back, remember? Until now! He just called me and said he could make it!” She squeaked. I blinked, unmoved.

  Ass-Crack was known for making these kinds of promises to Alyssa and he always had a way of backing out at the last minute.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, pointing a finger at me.

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t give me that, ‘Stop getting your hopes up, Alyssa,’ look. It’s not like I called him, Logan. He called me. He wants to be there.” She couldn’t stop smiling. It actually made me sad for her. I’d never seen someone who was so in need of feeling wanted in all of my life.

  You’re wanted, Alyssa Marie Walters. Promise.

  “I wasn’t giving you that look,” I lied. I was definitely givin
g her that look.

  “Okay. Let’s do pros and cons of the situation,” she suggested. Before Alyssa and I graduated high school that past June, we were in a history class where the teacher made us make pro and con lists for all of the wars that ever happened. It was so freaking annoying, plus, our teacher had the most monotone voice ever. So since then, Alyssa and I started doing pro and con lists for any and everything, using monotone voices of course.

  “Pro number one,” she said, her voice becoming numbingly bored. “He shows up.”

  “Con number one, he doesn’t,” I replied.

  She wiggled her nose in annoyance. “Pro number two, he shows up with flowers. He called and asked me what my favorite flower was. You don’t do that if you’re not bringing someone flowers!”

  Daisies. Ass-Crack should’ve known her favorite flower.

  “Con number two, he calls and cancels last minute.”

  “Pro number three,” she said, placing her hand on her hip. “He shows up and tells me how amazing I am. And how proud of me he is. And how much he missed me and loves me.” I go to open my mouth and she shushed me, dropping her monotone sound. “Listen, Lo. No more cons. I need you to look at me and be happy for me, okay? Even if it’s a fake happy!” She kept smiling with a high-pitch sound of excitement in her voice, but her eyes and hiccups always told how Alyssa was really feeling. She was nervous, scared that he’d let her down again.

  So I put on a smile for her, because I didn’t want her to be nervous or scared. I wanted her to actually feel as happy as she pretended to be. “This is good, Alyssa,” I said, lightly nudging her in the arm. “He’s coming!”

  A deep exhale left her and she nodded. “He’s totally going to be there.”

  “Of course he is,” I said with a fake confidence. “Because if there’s anyone in the world worth showing up for, it’s Alyssa-Fucking-Walters!”

  Her cheeks reddened and she nodded. “That’s me! Alyssa-Fucking-Walters!” She dug into her back pocket and pulled out a ticket that was in a zip-lock baggie. “Okay. So I need your help. I’m paranoid about Mom finding out I’ve been trying to talk to Dad. I don’t want him anywhere near our house. So I told Dad he could pick up the ticket from you here.” Alyssa looked at me with hopeful eyes that her plan was okay. It didn’t go unnoticed to me that she was now calling him “dad” again instead of Ass-Crack. That made me sadder for her.