Free Deviation (Deviate Series) by Dani Morales Page B

role.
    Before my sister and parents died I wasn’t the perfect teenager but I wasn’t this…mess that I’ve become. I was a straight A student in school, but not the nerdy girl. I was one of those girls who could fit in anywhere and everywhere. I was that girl you passed in the halls that always had a smile on her face. I was never popular but I didn’t lack friends either. I could sit anywhere and be happy. That all changed the day they left me here. I seem to get lost in thoughts about the past more often when Angel is around. I think it’s because he makes me feel safe. He asks me about what happened, about who I used to be, but I’m not ready to open up to him, not completely.
    Angel thinks I need to go to a counselor to talk about the past , their deaths, about what happened to me in foster care, and about my addictions. He thinks that it will help me. He’s wrong. I can feel the itch every day, the insane need to drown it all away, to reach into the darkness and surrender myself to oblivion again. He says he understands, that it’s a process but I don’t think he grasps just how much I struggle. Angel’s been there. He’s a recovering addict. He wants me to open up to him and part of me wants that; the part that’s completely head over heels in love with him. But then there’s this whole other side of me. A side that craves his touch, his intense gazes that promise so much more, but that’s also the part of me I’m trying to lock away; the part of me that screams trouble. Trouble, that if released again, I won’t be able to control.
    I’m staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. It’s 3 am and I’m fighting with my reflection. Each part of me is demanding to be brought to the surface. The one looking at me is the girl I used to be. She’s begging to be let out, to be more than a reflection. Then there’s me, the one in the here and now, the damaged one looking to take over completely. Fighting, always fighting, it’s like a never ending battle raging within me and I can’t stop it. I don’t know how to stop it, I don’t know if I want to. It’s a constant reminder that this is the path I chose. The path so off course that I don’t know if I can ever return to the original one. I didn’t leave bread crumbs like Hansel and Gretel, although those didn’t work out well for them either.
    I walk out of the bathroom and go to the bookcase to look for a book. I can see I’m not going to be going back to bed anytime soon, so I might as well do something productive, in an attempt to get my mind off of the war raging within. Running my fingers over the bindings of the books, head tilted to the right reading the spines, I come to this worn blue book. It looks completely out of place with the others. Where they look new, you can tell this one is old. It has no writing on the spine, so I pull it out to see what it is. Inscribed on the front, in the most beautiful cursive I have ever seen is the word Divinity. Completely intrigued to find out what this book is about, I head over to the lamp by the bean bag, turn it on, and collapse into the soft material. .
    The book contains p age after page of information on destiny and the course we are on, including different people’s takes on fate and whether they believe that we are all destined for a certain path. There was a story about how this girl didn’t believe she would ever get back to her given path; her destiny is what she called it. After years of working on righting the wrongs she’d committed in the past, she finally believed she was on her predestined path and was finally happy. I close the book after her story to think about what I’ve read. If they’re right and we are destined for something, what the hell could I be destined for? How can this be the life laid out for me by the fates? I guess they have a sick sense of humor. Maybe they pick people to have issues in order keep themselves entertained.
    What if the book holds truth? Can I be