Let's Pretend [Niall Horan]

Chapter 24

-Faith-

••Feb 1, 2013••

I walked into the living room with a hot cup of tea in my hands. The steam and the warmth radiating off of the white mug tingled my nearly frozen fingers. Slowly blowing on the calm smelling tea, I took a seat on the gray couch of Harry's sister's house.

I actually met Harry's sister this morning. Gemma was so kind, just like every other person I have met in this extended family. Just imagining never meeting these guys and Aria and Gemma was something I didn't even want to think about. Before it was just Mother, Shannon Chin, and I, but now I had so much more.

Zayn, who was sitting next to me, mumbled to himself a bit as he continued to read the book, The Fault in Our Stars. It was my most favorite book because it was about cancer. I loved John Green for writing that book as much as the character Hazel Grace Lancaster loved the writer Peter Van Houten. I was very envious of John Green who understood cancer without actually having cancer. And I suppose I must have felt the same way about cancer, as Hazel and Augustus Waters must have. But I couldn't remember any of my pain, so that was why I loved this book. It was something my housekeeper had bought for me one day. And because Zayn looked bored this morning, I asked him if he liked reading, and he said yes. So I handed him my favorite book, and he took it and since then he had never put down the book.

It surreal how I could call Zayn Malik my friend.

I mean, since I first can remember, I had been listening to One Direction music. I did it because it used to calm me when I was most aggravated. Mother used to tell me that it was bad for health for me to listen to music by One Direction, but I couldn't help it, it used to be my only enjoyment back at home. And that sweet lady Lisa who used to come to clean my already clean room, would bring me their new CD's behind Mother's back. I knew Mother never paid Lisa enough for all the work she did around our house, and yet she still used her own money to buy me little things like that.

She was sweet but she refused to really speak to me, like she didn't want to get in trouble. Instead she just did kind things as if I wouldn't know it was her that did it. Most of the time she would leave something under my big blue pillow with a little note that was most definitely her handwriting. Her notes were kind and sweet, but she always refused to speak to me face-to-face.

When Lisa left me the Up All Night CD under my pillow, I had to admit, I had it on a running loop for days. And when I first got caught with the CD from Mother and Shannon, Shannon laughed at me for liking such a childish band, and that night I cried.

But that same night instead of a 'sorry' or anything, Lisa just came and left me the Take Me Home CD. I didn't know what to do with it, but I was thankful because inside I knew that I loved One Direction and their voices.

And that one day when I went to the store with Mother, I had found a magazine that had, in big words, "One Direction: Biggest Band of this Generation!" I took that magazine and hid to read it in the baby isle.

Soon Mother found out about them and how happy they made me. At first I couldn't understand why Mother was so mad that I liked them, because they were just a band that I would probably never meet. But after a few months she got me tickets to a meet-and-greet with them.

Mother didn't tell me about the meet and greet till about an hour before the actual meet. She said it wasn't good for my health if I had gotten too excited about it for too long. And as soon as she told me, I definitely was so very excited just to meet the voices to the only happiness there was to my life.

I remembered feeling my heart beating in my head. Like every time my heart would beat, my head would throb.

When I met them though, there were only four of them. And I knew as a fact that there were five of them. Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and last but not least Niall Horan. Niall Horan sang the least in all the CD's and I was fully aware of it but I had fallen in love with his voice. It wasn't that I didn't love the rest of the boy's voices, but his voice calmed me the most. I even would repeat his solo in More Than This over and over. I guess inside I must have remembered Niall more than I thought I did. He was more to me than a voice singing on my CD player, but something from my past that Lisa helped me unconsciously remember.