They Came In Hoodies

Chapter 1: Strangers

HIYA!!!!! I'm back! (after a not so long break) I am so excited to release this new book! For anyone that is new to my stories, I put in songs to every chapter and mark the area to listen to the song with a <>.

Anyhow, lots of love for all of you.

Darla H

Stella POV

Have you ever had those dreams about falling, just when you are about to hit the ground you wake up? I am not afraid of hitting the ground, I never have been, but what scares me the most is falling. The feeling of uncontrolled motion... that is something that terrifies me the most.

All my life I could remember being in situations that were controlled, neat, wrapped up, even from an early part of my life. Both of my parents were highly educated and handled everything with logic. They quickly taught me to think the same way and now as a 17 year old, I lived by that line of thought. Logic and common sense was my rulebook and I made sure everything in my life reflected that. My whole life was filled with schedules and predictable things that I craved like water.

Even my parents' divorce was practicable. My parents didn't have a terrible break up, it was quite civil actually. I remember having a conversation over dinner about it, they talked as if it was something everyone did, fall out of love. The way they talked about it, made me believe them, thinking that love had its time and it wasn't forever.

I looked at my friends in LA and knew that their parents would fall out of love at one point because that was the predicable thing, just like my father did with my mother. Soon after they divorced, mom stayed in LA and my father went to his hometown to practice law.

I stayed with my mother, of course, the smart, driven university professor for UCLA who I called my role model was the logical person to stay with. I was never very close to my father, so I never missed him when he left. In fact I distanced myself farther as I got into middle school. By then, all summer vacations and winter ski trips ended as I became too busy to take time from my life to visit him and he was too busy to visit me in LA. My father quickly turned into someone more like a distant uncle more than a father, sending cards on my birthdays and Christmas.

So you can only believe the awkward conversation I had with her when she told me about her sabbatical in Ukraine. I will be honest, going to my father's for the two semesters wasn't my first pick, but it was the logical me and sometimes logical ideas weren't the things people wanted to do.

<>

Now I found myself walking down the aisle of some town supermarket, trying to have a conversation that I never thought I would have with a man that was my father in name only.

"So Stella, do you like cereal?" he asked as he stared at all the options to pick from.

I shook my head as I looked at the empty shopping cart. We had been here for 30 minutes already and the cart was still empty. I could see that he was trying, but that didn't make this any better for me. This was the smartest choice but I wished I was with mom instead of the cold Jackson Hole WY. "I am not really a breakfast person," I said to him as I pulled out my phone for the fifth time this shopping trip even though no one had texted me.

"You know, Bec is like that," he said, referring to his wife who I hadn't met.

Her name sent me back to when I got an invite in the mail almost a year ago saying this woman and my father got married. I was shocked by it, but not as shocked as my mother, who took it quite hard for a few days. I never understood if she was mad he never told us or that he had moved on from her. My father never told me he was dating or that he was engaged. It was just as if one day he had a wife, a stepmother to me, who was even more of a stranger than my father. I didn't know the first thing about her, I didn't even know how they met which made her feel even more distant.