Chapter one
Olive
Therearetwothingsin this life of mine that I know to be one hundred percent true.
The first is I’m surrounded by love in every corner I look.
The second is that I’ve never felt lonelier than I do right now.
Both of my sisters are sitting on either side of me with baby Willow resting on Cassandra’s chest, a throw blanket splayed over the four of us, and a bowl of popcorn resting on my lap.
Still,still,I have this raging feeling deep in my chest that I’m undeserving of the love they all hand my way.
Growing up the way I did, with the parents we have, my sisters and I were taught what it meant to build a foundation around you.
To be respectful, but never beg for respect in return.
To never go to bed angry, but to not expect others to do the same.
And lastly, to apologize if we’re ever in the wrong.
No matter what.
Our mom always told us the best thing a man can do is love his wife unconditionally and publicly. We saw that from our dad every single day.
But while Cassandra and Lizzie absorbed that information and ingrained it into every relationship they ever had, I never really had the chance to.
I’m a lone wolf. I always have been.
In school, I never felt the pressure to date, fall in love, or force myself to be with somebody I didn’t genuinely care for.
Hurting people for the sake of maintaining friendships, to keep up appearances with the popular kids to make them like me, just didn’t seem like something I could do.
Instead, I focused on writing songs, perfecting my pitch, and learning how to play guitar, so much so that nobody really cared to know anything about me.
They looked at me as boring and innocent.
I preferred it that way.
But it’s hard to admit you’re lonely, when your whole life, you’ve begged to be alone.
There are very few people in the universe I would drop everything for, and very few people would do the same for me.
Does it make me a loser to know without a doubt that my two best friends are the girls beside me? The two girls who, at one point in my life, I didn’t want to even let in my bedroom until night came, and I pretended to be scared of the dark, just so they would comfort me?
It worked most of the time, but I think Lizzie caught on quickly. She noticed how my behavior during the day and my attitude at night were vastly different.
I guess I was happy to be invisible, and fly under the radar. But shit still happened to me that nobody really noticed, and I wanted to decompress with my best friends, just like any other teenage girl.
While I didn’t do a lot of the talking, it still helped to know that they were there. It eased my mind a little.
"Earth to Olive," Lizzie, my twin sister, says, waving her hand in front of my face.
I blink away the memories that cloud my vision and force the tears to remain in the back of my throat instead of falling down my cheeks.
"Sorry, I was mentally running through my checklist for the tour," I tell them with complete and utter confidence, knowing full well that I went through that list a million times yesterday.
And the day before.
