Free Strange and Lovely (Part 1) by Rachel Redd

Chapter 1
    I laid out on my roof, gazing up at the sky. My favorite constellation was Libra with its symbol of the weighing scales. I was most comfortable when everything was balanced. But tomorrow, all that was going to change.
    I wouldn’t be able to do this for another nine weeks once I was at Valhalla University in the city tomorrow morning. Instead of basking under the glimmer of starlight, I would be simmering underneath the washed out halogen lights of a too tightly packed lecture hall. New York City had always been this glamorous, different world to me, but tomorrow it would be my home. I’d spent the last eighteen years of my life here in Willows Peak. Oddly, still, there was something strange and lovely about the great and vast unknown.
    I couldn’t sleep. It was too hot, my mind was too chaotic, and I kept feeling like I forgot to pack something. Leaving nothing to chance, I mulled over everything I had craftily stuffed in my suitcase: toothbrush, toothpaste, blankets, pillows, loose leaf paper, pens, pencils, calculator, a mini bottle of liquor...
    In my periphery, I saw a shadow running across my yard. I sat up, and watched the shadow stop at the oak tree in front of my house. It grabbed the lowest tree branch, and pulled itself up. It continued to climb up until it was almost level with the roof. A hand reached up onto the shingles, and Declan pulled himself up onto the roof.
    “How did I know you’d be here?” he asked, walking over and sitting next to me.
    “I tried sleeping in my bed,” I said. “It was claustrophobic.”
    “You realize a dorm will be half the size of your room, right?” he asked. “You should stay here. I’m just as good as any Ivy League professor.”
    “Didn’t you once fail art class?” I asked.
    “I wanted to see what would happen if you put a calculator into a kiln,” he said. “Apparently, it spontaneously combusts.”
    “I’m pretty certain it’s not spontaneous when it’s inside a kiln that’s burning over a thousand degrees,” I said.
    “It seemed pretty spontaneous to Mrs. Burkowski,” he said. I laughed.
    “Poor Mrs. Burkowski,” I said. “You nearly gave her a heart attack.”
    I looked back up at the stars. He looked up too.
    “Do you see Libra?” I asked.
    “I see a bunch of little dots,” he said. “I’ve heard they call them stars.”
    I punched him in the shoulder. He laughed as he rubbed where I had clocked him.
    Declan and I first met when we were in third grade. A male classmate had pushed me to the ground, and Declan rushed over to protect me. I shoved Declan to the ground for interfering, and we became life-long friends after that.
    “Are you scared?” he asked. “Going off to live in the Big Apple? The City that Never Sleeps? You know there’s a lot of freaks in city at night. You’re not a kid anymore, Rory. You can’t just trust everybody. ”
    “A little,” I said. “But not because it’s a city. I’m afraid of leaving everything behind here, and when I come back, nothing will be the same.”
    “I’ll be the same,” Declan said. “We can spontaneously combust a calculator for old time’s sake when you come back.”
    He placed his hand right next to mine, so that our pinkies almost touched. I moved my hand, clasping my hands together over my knees.
    Declan was considered attractive. I had known him too long to really reflect on his physical appeal, but women do tend to circle him like he’s fresh meat, and they’re hyenas. He was tall with a broad chest. His eyes are dark and curious. A mess of mid-length hair fell over his ears. I thought the largest attraction for women though was his danger appeal. They saw a man that was from the upstate “rust belt,” and they assumed that he was the same as the bad boys in movies. Maybe he was to them, but I always saw the same boy I knew as a kid.
    Declan tugged on a strand of my hair. He never changed; definitely still the same scrawny boy I once knew. I whacked his hand