The worst part of sleeping with your ex-boyfriend who was a celebrity? You couldn’t simply wallow in self-pity for your bad mistake. You were forced to see him everywhere you went. On billboards, in movie trailers, in the checkout line at the grocery store. The checkout line was the worst place to see him, too. Because on those magazine covers, Landon was never alone. There was always some drop-dead gorgeous model or actress attached to his arm. He always looked dapper as ever, smiling from ear to ear.
The next few days, I tried to keep myself busy even though my mind was looking for a million reasons to think about Landon. I avoided social media for forty-eight hours to avoid seeing Landon’s face plastered all over the internet with photographs from the party.
Temptation was the devil. There were so many times in those forty-eight hours that I wanted to type his name into a Google search just to read the most recent articles about him. But I wouldn’t, because that would be opening myself up for more pain and hurt.
I didn’t have time to hurt over that man; I did enough of that in my past.
I busied myself with writing. Creating fictional worlds was my favorite thing to do when my reality felt too heavy. I loved writing love stories because it took me away from the fact that I didn’t believe in true love anymore. At least in my stories,true love was a real thing. And in those stories? True love always won. Outside of my own writing, I’d been mentoring a special teenage girl through her own exploration of creativity. Teaching writing turned out to be almost as enjoyable as writing itself, to me.
“How did you get so good at this?” Karla asked as she read over a few of my manuscripts with a look of awe in her eyes. I wished I could’ve had agents look at my words with such amazement, the same way that fourteen-year-old girl stared at them. To be fair, my newest work from the past week did feel like the best I’d written in a while. Unfortunately, Landon was the muse behind the written words. I hated that he inspired me even in the slightest amount, but Karla was right—I loved the words I’d written out of my spite for my evening with Landon. The words came to life as they spilled out of me.
Karla was Greyson’s oldest daughter. She’d been through a lot of emotional and physical trauma after a massive car crash that took her mother’s life and left Karla battered and bruised. She walked with a heavy limp due to the accident, and her face and arms had scars all over. She dressed in all black and wore her hair over her face to hide a few of the scars, but I was trying my best to convince her that her scars were beautiful.
We’d met a few weeks ago when Greyson invited me to join the girls and Eleanor for a baseball game. Karla and I clicked, which seemed like a big deal, because Greyson said his daughter had been antisocial for a long time running. Ever since the accident, Karla lost a lot of her friends. They mocked her for her appearance and called her Hunchback due to her posture.
I remembered high school being cruel when I was there, but I couldn’t have imagined being in school with today’s technology. The things Karla had told me people had said and sent to her via social media made my skin crawl.
How did we develop into a world where children had no morals? When did they become so cruel?
Once Karla learned I was a writer, she asked if I could look over some of her stories.“You don’t have to, because I’m sure you’re busy, and wouldn’t want to waste your time with my stupid work,”she’d said, putting herself down—something I was certain she learned to do from others.“I don’t want to waste your time.”
I hated how low her self-confidence was, and I wanted to help her build it up as much as possible, even if it was through her written word. Plus, I enjoyed her company. She was a good kid with a damaged heart who just needed to be told she was enough.
I once knew a broken boy with his own set of scars who’d needed to be told of his worth, too. What could I say? I had a type.
I smiled as Karla’s eyes moved back and forth over my manuscript.
“I’ll never be this good.”
“No,” I corrected, taking the papers from her grip. “You’ll be better. You’re already better. So let’s get back to work on your manuscript. We can plot out some of the major scenes and go from there.”
She nodded with a frown, almost as if she was afraid to dive deeper into her story. I placed a comforting hand against hers. “You know you’re good enough, Karla, right? You are a beautiful girl with beautiful stories living inside of you. You’re allowed to let those stories out.”
She lowered her head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Call me beautiful. I know it’s not true and that you’re trying to be nice, but you don’t have to lie.”
I placed my finger beneath her chin and raised her stare tolock with mine. “You are beautiful, Karla. Every single piece of you. And the parts that you think are ugly are truly the most stunning parts.”
She huffed. “Tell that to the boys at school.”
“Lucky for us, the boys at school do not get to define what beautiful is. We do.”
She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head toward me, as if she was trying to figure me out. “How did you get so confident?”
“Easy.” I shrugged. “I stopped saying mean things to myself.”
“I can’t even think of a mean thing you’d ever say to yourself. I mean, look at you. You’re perfect. If I looked like you, I’d have every guy in the world wanting to look my way.”
“You don’t need boys to look at you to be worthy.”
“Says the woman who probably has every man looking at her.”
Before I could reply, Karla’s phone went off. I saw “Uncle Landon” flash across the screen before she scrambled to answer it.
My stomach knotted up from seeing his name on her screen. I knew Landon had been close with Greyson’s two girls, especially after the accident, but seeing the wordunclenext to his name made it clear that he was a lot closer to the girls than I’d even known.