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A/N: I present to you Daveed Diggs with cornrows, very important for later on.
2005
She met Thomas on a hot August day, a week before she started Kindergarten. She was five and he was seven. He was new in town and he moved in next door to her. Her previous next-door neighbors were jerks, she was glad to see the Reynolds go. Especially their nine-year-old son.
But Thomas was not much of an improvement. She hated him the moment he opened his mouth to speak to her. Who honestly thought they were better and smarter than someone because they were older by two years? Thomas did. It was wrong of course, but it still irked her.
He was wrong, so incredibly wrong, and yet she couldn't prove him right. He was too stubborn and pig-headed to see the light. Her parents often said she was stubborn and never had she taken offense to that, not until now because if stubborn meant being like Thomas... well then she was nothing of the sort.
It was then, maybe, that she decided that she would always be ahead of him.
2010
Angelica was ten and Thomas was twelve. It was the beginning of the school year. For the first time in a long time, Angelica would walk to school without Thomas and she would be at school without Thomas. It scared her because somewhere along the way they had become friends, they still competed with each other, and sometimes she wanted to downright punch the boy, but they were friends.
Of course, she still had her sisters, but Eliza was just starting third grade and Peggy first grade. She would be all alone at recess and lunch.
But she would manage, she wasn't dependent on Thomas, she wasn't dependent on anyone.
So she definitely wasn't crying herself to sleep tonight.
She woke up the next morning with her eyes slightly puffy but no one but herself would notice. She got dressed for school, had her breakfast, and just like that it was time for her to walk to school.
She said her goodbyes to her parents and Eliza and Peggy who didn't start school until a later time.
She walked out the door with her head held high and tried her best not to let the negative thoughts take place in the front of her mind, they were in the back and that was where they belonged.
She made her way down the driveway and walked on the edge of the sidewalk but stopped right in front of Thomas's house. She stared at the bright magenta door that she remembered Thomas bragging to her about because his parents had allowed him to paint it that color. For a week she had begged her parents to do the same with the color pink, in the end, the final answer was no.
As her gaze was glued onto the purple door her heart hurt as she remembered that Thomas would not be racing out of it at any second. She took in a deep breath and forced her eyes away from the door and once again began to teeter on the edge of the cracked sidewalk.
