Free Unaltered #2_A Diamond in my Heart by Lorena Angell

so Brand could give it to me. By
this time, we’d drawn a lot of attention from the other park
attendees.
    “Why didn’t you repeat? Why did you
purchase more tries? And why didn’t you go after the plate on the
bottom row?”
    “Sometimes I like to spice things up,
like the last football game of the season. I stopped repeating my
throws so we could lose and be done with it. This little amusement
park game was a metaphor to my life; sometimes I stick with one
thing until I succeed, and other times I let chance determine if
I’ll succeed. You probably noticed that the same things happened
each time we repeated, like the crowd was always the same, the same
people looked our way when the toothless wonder would ring the bell
and the man always stood in the same place to hand me the set of
balls. This is how I won the fight you saw earlier; I knew when I
was going to be punched and I’d repeat until I could avoid the
punch. Every hit and punch hurt, especially the knife to my gut,
but repeating takes my body back, not my memories, the same as you
just witnessed.” He placed his hand on the small of my back and
guided me through the crowd. Then he took my hand and whooshed me
back to the moment he handed me the stuffed puppy.
    I looked at him with question in my
eyes.
    “They are headed in our direction.
Let’s go the other way.” He guided me the other direction away from
the crowd. We walked briskly without looking back and once we’d put
enough distance between us and the gang, he stopped me by a bench
and took the puppy out of my arms and placed it down.
    “Calli, why can’t I ever convince you
to go out with me?”
    “Back to this, are we?”
    “You know all those times I tried to
get you to say yes, and how I’d get frustrated with you and ask why
you were so persistent?”
    “Yeah, you’d get upset so
quickly.”
    “That’s what you saw. Truth was I’d
repeated several times until the point where I’d snap. My snapping
became the version you saw and remembered. Don’t you like me,
Calli?”
    “Brand, you’re not my kind of guy. I
think we can be good friends, but I don’t see you in any other
way.” I tried to let him down easily.
    “Just a friend?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Can friends hug?” He executed the
‘dimples’, his only true weapon in softening a girl’s
heart.
    “Yeah, as long as you don’t try
anything.”
    He opened his arms in invitation for
my hug. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized Suz was
watching this from a distance and yet it didn’t stop me. I stepped
into his embrace and hugged him like I would hug my father. I can’t
speak for him, but I don’t believe for a second he was hugging me
like he would his mother. Brand was an opportunist and I’d just
fallen into his opportunistic arms.
    I pushed him away and scanned the area
and found the backside of Suz’s head as she walked away. Strangely,
I didn’t feel sad. I guess after finding out she’d set the
firecracker in middle school, I’d distanced myself from her. I
realized she’d never really been a good friend to me but I was more
of a burden to her.
    I thought about her infatuation with
Brand and how it must really hurt her to see me hugging him, but
instead of empathizing with her, I decided to get to the bottom of
why Brand had shunned her.
    “Brand, what happened with Suz? Why
did you break off your friendship?”
    “I’ll only tell you this if you swear
you won’t tell Suz.”
    “Suz and I aren’t friends
anymore. Besides, I’m a vault, Brand.” More than you know.
    “I was making out with Suz
one day when my mother busted in on us and revealed I was making
out with my half-sister . My father and her mother had an affair and Suz is the
result. I knew about my parents' rocky beginnings but I never knew
who he cheated with. I was able to repeat back to before my mother
came in and save Suz from embarrassment. I’ve had to give her the
cold shoulder to suppress her attractions to me. I suppose I