[Completed] Ranked #1!
Ariana Grayson is young, beautiful, popular...and dead. Her best friend, Everly Clarke, is devastated and broken. She has never had to live without Ariana, relying on her as a crutch to hide her crippling anxiety. After meetin...
I walked in the house, unlocking the back door with my key and stepped into our kitchen. I flipped on a light and said a "hello", waiting only seconds to see if I'd get a reply. I kicked off my shoes at the bottom of the stairs and walked barefoot up to my room.
My mom knocked on my door softly, pushing it open.
"Hey," I greeted her. I began pulling out my pajamas.
"Hi, honey," she greeted me in return and sat at the edge of my bed. "Everly, we need to talk."
I swallowed hard before asking her what she wanted to talk about. I was a bit nervous since she never said things like that.
She knows about Leo! My head screamed. I willed my face not to give myself away. I hadn't told her about him yet. Instead, I would casually answer "out with friends" whenever she asked where I was going. That had been enough..until now, I feared.
My mom sighed, picking at invisible lint on my bed. "College."
I let out a sigh of relief. "Oh. College? Okay. What do you want to talk about specifically?"
"Well," she started. "Your dad and I were wondering if you'd started to consider any? There are obviously the local ones, but we didn't know if you were thinking out of state colleges or..."
I began to put my clean laundry away that had been sitting folded in a basket in my floor for the past week.
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"I'm not really sure, mom," I admitted. "I still have a while. There's all of senior year still. It's not something I've really started to put much thought into, honestly."
"You should start thinking about it," she told me. "If you wanted to go away to college, there's a lot of planning involved, and that's after getting accepted. I went away to college and it was one of the best things I ever did." She stared off dreamily.
"Are you trying to get me to move out?" I jokingly accused.
"Gosh, no!" she said, blinking back to reality. "But going out of state...I just thought with Ariana, you know, not being here...it might be good for you to have a change of scenery, that's all."
"Oh," I replied softly.
"Just start thinking about it," she suggested. "We have plenty of time to talk it over with your dad, too. But I just wanted to see if you'd thought about it at all yet."
I shrugged. "Okay, mom. I'll give it some thought."
That seemed to please her well enough. As soon as my mom left my room, I felt bad. I hadn't thought about college at all since the funeral. At first it was because of everything else occupying my mind when Ariana died. But then, after I came to the decision that I would have to join Ariana, well... College was no longer an option for me. That realization was like something had been painfully ripped from my hands. I had always dreamed of the day when I would get to start college. It just sounded so mature and grown up to me.
