1

Of Soccer Balls and Froot Loops

I had plans for the summer break. Oh yes, I did. Not big plans, not expensive plans, not even scandalous road trips to Florida, nor would I have any embarrassing “loose bikini” stories to tell when I returned for school the next year. Nope.

But was I planning to take extreme advantage of my two months of freedom? You bet I was.

I was going to sleep, sleep, and sleep myself away, eat a ridiculous amount of junk inconceivable to be consumed by someone of my rather small frame, watch all the mind-bogglingly horrid daytime television I could, sit in front of my precious computer for hours, kick my own butt at video games, and most important of all, hang out with my friends.

My best friend Davis, who I’d known practically since the womb, just managed to get out of his family’s plans to laze around like a slug with me for two months. It was going to be awesome.

However, unbeknownst to me, my mother had other plans.

As Davis and I kicked around a soccer ball on my front lawn on this sweltering Saturday, my mother pulled up in her mini-van. It was around late afternoon, the hot sun still beating down on us.

“Brenna, Davis! How are you kids doing this fine afternoon?” Mum greeted us cheerfully as she emerged from the van, her face hardly visible through all the bags of groceries.

“Why so positively jolly today, mum?” I inquired, kicking the ball up in the air and then smashing it over to Davis, who boldly head-butted it back to me.

“Well, funny you should ask, darling. Aside from the lovely shopping experience I just had, Diane and I had a lovely chat as well.” My mum winked at me. My stomach plummeted about four feet.

“What, in the veggie isle? Did you argue over who can make a better casserole?” I snorted sarcastically. My mum wasn’t a fan of my sarcasm, nor was she a fan of the fact that I played soccer and video games.

Diane was a nice lady. Chubby, blonde and very charming. It was an absolute international mystery as to why her sons turned out so rotten, when she was a bloody candy apple herself.

Brushing thoughts of them aside, I slammed my foot into the ball viciously and it flew at the speed of light towards Davis’s head, but he swiftly caught it.

I glanced at my mum and saw her rolling her eyes at my unladylike sarcasm. “No hands!” I teased Davis playfully, brushing my dark hair out of my eyes and shielding my vision from the harsh sun. I motioned for my mum to continue.

She set down her grocery bags purposefully as if she were about to lay down a business proposition. Instead of paying her our undying attention, Davis and I continued our match – which, courtesy of my blossoming feeling of utter dread, was becoming rather heated.

“We’re all going camping this summer!” She exclaimed proudly. I bounced the ball off my knee and raised an eyebrow.

“Mum? You? Camping? Have you bumped your head or something?” Davis and I exchanged concerned glances. He shot the ball right back at me and I instinctively swung my leg around and punted it away again.

“No!” My mum was positively bursting with excitement and her cheerfulness was sort of frightening me. “Diane and I thought it would be a wonderful chance for us girls to just relax, and all the boys can… well, do what boys do while camping!” She chirped.

When I returned from fetching a stray ball, I tossed it to Davis and furrowed my brow. “Um, and who are “all the boys” you speak of?” My remote feeling of dread had returned, but I just swallowed and hoped it would go away.

My mum’s smile grew even wider as she delivered her final news. I waited with baited breath as my stomach began to twist in anxious knots. “We’re going with the Rykers, of course! So that’ll be… hmm, let’s see, that sweet boy Liam? I think he’s your age. And his brother, your brother, and the dads! You can come too, if you’d like, Davis…”

My mum liked to talk, usually just to hear her own voice. When she talked, she tended not to notice things around her. But I had definitely noticed what she had said.

I wasn’t entirely certain what had happened next. I could have sworn I had anticipated and seen the ball coming, but for some reason my shock had prevailed over my common sense and my reflexes.

And then I was sprawled on my back in the grass, dazed.

When the black spots faded from the edges of my vision, I groaned and tried to blink away my dizziness.

Davis’s face appeared above me, and my mum’s. Beyond that, everything was blue. Davis was nervously scratching the back of his head of unruly brown curls, but a sly grin was stretching its way across his innocent features.

“Owww…” I moaned, raising a hand to my bruised head.

“Honey! Speak to me! Do you remember your name? How many fingers am I holding up?” My mum burst out frantically, evidently she had taken a moment to actually survey her surroundings, and cut her monologue short in time to notice her daughter sprawled on the ground.

“Man, Bree! You’ve had your fair share of sports injuries… most of which I’ve been blessed enough to witness, but this is by far my favourite!” Davis peered down at me through his damned puppy dog eyes, and promptly burst into laughter.

“That would probably be because you were kind enough to endow it upon me, you ass!” I frantically flung out my legs toward him but with no luck.

“Dude, what are you trying to do?”

“I’m trying to kick you, but I can’t reach!”

- - -

The next night was the last day of my weekend freedom before it was off to school for one last week of torture, and then I would be thrust off unwillingly into a whole other kind of torture.

“I can not believe I agreed to this!” I groaned, flopping rather unceremoniously onto my bed, scowling contemptuously at the ceiling.

Davis - who was so often a guest at my house that my family barely bothered to acknowledge him as one anymore, spun around in my computer chair in an evil genius like manner, looking at me inquisitively.

I snatched a glass snow globe from my bedside table and began an angry routine of tossing it at the ceiling.

Davis raised an eyebrow. “I can. I guess you just didn’t want to disappoint your mum, like that time when you showed up in your dirty soccer uniform to that fancy tea party thing –”

“– That was on purpose, by the way,” I cut in, smirking at the memory.

“Or, maybe someone is just dying to spend her summer with a certain strapping Liam Ryker?” Davis formed a very devilish smirk, but immediately ducked for cover as I feigned whipping the snow globe at his head.

His messy fluff of brown hair appeared from behind the chair again, only his eyes peeking out at me. “Hey, now! We don’t want two injuries in one weekend, now do we?”

I sat up cross-legged and carefully set the globe down next to me. “Don’t even start, Dave. You know I can’t stand him. God, did you have to remind me that I have to spend a whole month alone with that jackass?”

Davis still hadn’t emerged from behind the chair, evidently expecting another attack. “Well… you won’t have to be alone with him necessarily, you know… unless you want to –”

WHUMP.

“Ow!”

- - -

What was that inhuman noise attempting to wake me at such an ungodly hour?

Oh, crap.

I rolled over with some difficulty and smacked my alarm clocks OFF button. It was Monday. The day dreaded above all days. With the exception of the coming weekend, of course. Who would have ever thought there would come a time when a teenager would not look forward to a weekend?

Groaning audibly, I detangled myself from the sheets and stumbled sleepily over to my bathroom to begin my morning ritual. This involved promptly splashing cold water on my face, brushing my teeth, and stumbling a bit less sleepily back into my room to get dressed.

I flung open a drawer a pulled out a white Hurley baby tee and my most adored camo Capri pants. Quite a search proved fruitful indeed when I pulled my over worn green zip-up Element hoody out from my bag.

It was interesting how I never had much interest in matching, but always ended up pretty colour-coordinated.

Flopping down on my bed with my head hung over the edge, I slung my hair up into its usual messy high ponytail. Swinging my bag over one shoulder, seemingly satisfied with my appearance, I trotted down the stairs.

As usual, Davis was already seated at the table munching on a muffin, one of my mum’s specialties. I opted for an overflowing bowl of Froot Loops, and turned to Davis with my mouth full.

“Sho, meeting me for lunch?” I mumbled through my cereal and milk filled cheeks.

I could hear my mum kissing her teeth in disapproval loud and clear across the room.

Davis paused for a moment, looking startled, and put down his muffin, actually bothering to swallow before speaking. “Actually, um, there’s something else I kind of need to do…” He stuttered. Davis was a terrible liar.

“Oh, yeah?” I swallowed my breakfast. “What’s that?” I inquired innocently.

Davis looked at the floor. “Erm, nothing you’d be interested in.”

I grinned, patting him on the back. “Oh, nonsense. Enlighten me.” I chirped. I could see the irritation clear as day but he was trying to cover it up.

“You have other friends, Bree, really. It’s not that big a deal.” His cheeks were rather rosy at this point.

I knew I was pushing this a little far, but I continued anyway. “Oh, but really, it is. I wouldn’t give up spending time with you for the world! Just tell me what it is, maybe I can come along?” I pestered in a sing-song voice.

Normally, Davis put up with my annoying habits. He stood up very suddenly, his face very solemn, and started to walk towards the door. “Just drop it, okay?” He muttered angrily.

I said nothing, shocked at his sudden change in mood. What was up?

Halfway through second period media studies found me still very puzzled by my best friend’s behaviour. Davis never really hid anything from me, and if he had in the past he did a very good job. We didn’t have secrets, so this must have been something he was extremely embarrassed about.

I absentmindedly chewed on my pen – a pretty horrid habit that had on occasion given me a blue face. The teacher was droning on about end of year reports and how concerned he was with most of us.

Don’t get me wrong, media studies was a pretty hard subject, but I was sailing through it. Therefore I felt no need to listen to his speech, as it just wasn’t addressing me in particular.

I wasn’t one to just let mysteries pass me by unsolved. When there was something I didn’t know I couldn’t get through the day without figuring it out. This was a matter that desperately needed my attention, much more than my media studies teacher did at the moment.

I was determined to find out what it was that my best friend was up to that he so felt the need to hide it from me. I was almost insulted that there was something that he felt he couldn’t tell me, his female counterpart. It had to be a guy thing.

Maybe there was a girl! He must have been planning to meet some girl at lunch.

Davis with a girl other than me was a pretty odd idea, no offense to the guy. It had just been us our whole lives, both completely oblivious to the fact that we were of opposite genders. We were the three musketeers without a third, because let’s face it – three’s a crowd.

Davis wasn’t exactly high schools most wanted. He was good looking, adorable, and extremely charming, but he wasn’t any Liam Ryker. Who so happened to be on the football team, the soccer team, and candidate for the most popular, sought after guy in school. Girls drooled over him.

Oh, but not me. I hated his guts, and always have. I could see right through his fake exterior, that tanned, blonde hair, brown eyes combo. He was just another jock, another conceited, snobby rich kid.

Davis, despite all his admirable traits, was a bit geeky. That’s why he was my best friend. He definitely tried to be a ladies man, with that comic-relief character of his, but most of the girls he tried to impress just laughed and went back to drooling over Liam and the others.

Now I was even more resolute to discover exactly what Davis Lazzaro was up to.