“Hey, Madison,” Glen answered his phone reluctantly after he saw the caller id. “What’s up?….Yeah, sorry, I got caught up the other day after school….Tonight? Uh, yeah, sure, oh wait..I can’t, sorry….My dad. We’re kinda doing this father-son thing tonight…uh, rain check maybe? …cool.. ok, sweet, well I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

Glen closed his phone and looked around his room. He’d spent most of his day sleeping. Make that all of his day. He just couldn’t get her out of his mind. She’d caused the fight two weeks earlier. The fight that had left him on house arrest for a week. The fight that had gained him nothing but glares from his mother and disappointed looks from his dad. My parents are so weird… He was used to it though. He knew that the Carlin family didn’t put up with much. They never had to before really. Picture perfect. That’s what Becca had always called them. He could suddenly see her face. Becca was his girlfriend back in Ohio. Those beautiful brown eyes. He could still see her standing there on the porch of his Ohio home. Her eyes slowly filling up with tears as she told him goodbye. She was the only one. She knew him better than most. The only one who knows me. She knew him as Glen Carlin, the nice guy, the caring guy, the weak guy. “You’re just a weak, scared little boy, Glen, and you hate that about yourself!” He could hear her words running through his mind, and it made him smile. She had read him perfectly from the beginning, and a simple two days after she met him she was calling him a coward. never afraid… Standing on his porch, she had given him that last hug. She had smiled and said those words. I love you. He’d never said them. He couldn’t. Because I’m a weak, scared little boy. She never seemed bothered by the fact that he couldn’t reciprocate her words because she knew that the feelings were there. She had just smiled and turned to go. and then she was gone….