Lost&Found: My Wild Rose (Chapter 9+)

(To avoid confusion, I wouldn't recommend reading this until you've read a chapter or so of the novel. Once you catch on to the style it's written in it's much easier to make sense of it. This fits in after chapter nine.)

I always wandered what girls said when guys weren’t around. When I saw Amy and Mira together there was a lot to be curious about, and I had to wonder if much of Mira’s behaviour towards be was not influenced by what Amy had to say.

See, Amy and I had been to hell and back on parallel tracks.

I can remember Amy when she was the red-head with glasses trying too hard to fit in. No doubt she remembered when I hardly said a word and enjoyed watching TV dramas more than kids cartoons.

I remember finding her hiding in the tunnel of the Penguin Playground, and how she cried so hard because her daddy left her. When I carelessly invited her round to my house, the look on her face was the first time I realised something about that place wasn’t right.

On my thirteenth Christmas I left my home without anyone noticing, after an event that everybody except me was too drunk to remember, and wandered down to the Playground. There I sat on the bench opposite the round-about when Amy arrived a short while later. She seemed like she hadn’t expected to see me, but carried on walking as if she would have sat next to any stranger who was there.

After she had sat down I cupped my hand around hers. It was awkward at first, but we were glad. As long as we held each others hand we didn’t have to think about anything else.

Since this book is supposed to be the honest, and shameless truth, I’ll admit that Amy and I fooled around sometimes. As you get older, holding hands doesn’t quite have the same effect.

It was always unspoken. The bond between us was always strong, but our relationship was shallow. We never hung around much, and most people would never think that we where anything more than long-time classmates.

I can’t explain what changed right now, you’ll find out later. With our relationship so shallow and our ties so discrete, Amy is never a catalyst in this story. I couldn’t tell you anything more about her than Collin or Simon could. At first, she was just Amy, but as sentimentalities started to form in my life I thought about her more than I used to.

Amy knew me longer than anyone else. Through most of my life she was just there, and that meant something to me.

When I finally came to write this novel I started writing about her, I found myself calling her by a new name.

My Wild Rose.