Hunter Evans has been gone for a year with rumors of him being in prison. On the first day of her junior year, the last thing Drew Carter expects is to see Hunter walking through the doors, let alone falling in love with the boy everyone is terrifie...
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"I cannot believe they let that delinquent back into our school!"
I rolled my eyes as I listened to Katie complain to Quinn on the way home from school. One of Quinn's friends was almost always catching a ride home with us. It was kind of annoying. Plus, it meant I always had to sit in the back of Quinn's tiny Volkswagen bug which was not comfortable. I couldn't wait until I got my own car.
I tried to ignore them as I looked out the window and watched all of the trees go by. Roslyn was a very small town located in Central Washington with a population of less than 1000 people. There were pros and cons to living there. One of the biggest pros in my opinion was the weather. I loved the colder weather and mostly enjoyed the rain and snow. The biggest con of living in a small town: everybody knew everybody, and everybody talked.
It bothered me that Quinn and Katie could so easily dish out negative words about someone they no longer knew, let alone someone who had been such a good friend to Quinn and me growing up. A sense of longing brewed in the pit of my stomach as I thought about the good memories of our childhood that we shared with him. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss our friendship. I still remembered the awful day that Quinn came home from school 3 years prior, announcing that she and Hunter were no longer friends and that I was no longer allowed to hang out with him. When I pressed for more information, she always wrote me off.
I was only in 8th grade at the time so I went to the local middle school, while Hunter and Quinn had moved up to high school. Had I still gone to the same school as him, I might have asked what had happened between the two and tried to fix it, but I didn't see him. He stopped coming around. At first I assumed it would blow over, but the longer it went on, the more I felt like I couldn't just pop over to his house like Quinn and I always had. Plus, when he and Quinn stopped talking, he had stopped talking to me too and I was sure it was on purpose.
"Me either! Did you see all those tattoos? And the cold look on his face! I bet it won't be long until he ends up right back in prison," Quinn scoffed, bringing me out of my thoughts.
"That's rude," I commented, not being able to bite my tongue which made Quinn shoot me a dirty look through the rearview mirror.
"No it's not. It's just facts. Like 70 something percent of all people who go to prison, end up going back," Katie stated. I thought my eyes might roll right out of my head. Everybody in this town loved drama, I was sure everybody was making this out to be something it was not.
"Exactly. I know you think you know him because we grew up with him, but he's not a good person. You need to stay away from him, Drew," Quinn said sternly, like I was going to listen to what Quinn told me to do. Yeah, right. I wanted to be nothing like her or her friends so I wasn't exactly eager to take her advice.
"He probably didn't even do what everyone says he did. Besides, I can't stay away from him, he's my physics partner," I informed her and sat back with an annoyed look on my face. For some reason I felt satisfaction in letting her know that; satisfaction in implying that I would form my own opinions of him.
