Prologue
They say I’m lucky.
Less than two millimeters to the right and I would have been gone before they found me on the bathroom floor.
But I’m not lucky at all.
I have nothing—not a cent to my name, a future to work toward, or a family who knows their daughter nearly bled out on the grubby, cold tiles of a public bathroom at a truck stop.
The rich-colored haired doctor looking over my chart regards me with questionable caution as he delivers yet another, “You’re very fortunate, Ms. Underwood.” There’s a distant smile on his face—full of curiosity over the eighteen-year-old propped up on the hard stretcher with wrapped wrists and hollow eyes in front of him.
That girl doesn’t feel like me—she feels distant and cold, lost mentally and emotionally somehow.
“Out of your head, Underwood,” my best friend always told me when I’d lose myself in it, waiting for the trained, “Head in the game” reply he got from me every time.
I’m not her anymore though.
Because I’m not fortunate at all.
I was two millimeters off.
Chapter One
Two Years Later
Ivy
The pounding headache in my temples matches the loud thumping of my housemate’s headboard smacking into the wall above me. Covering my face with the stained, flattened, pillow does little to drown out what’s going on upstairs. What’s always going on. That’s what you get when your rent is dirt cheap—four hours of sleep a night in a party house that I heard had a spare room through the grapevine at work.
I didn’t realize when I showed up with two measly bags and the clothes on my back that I’d be shoved in the dank, musty half-finished basement that smells like old socks and lavender Febreze and brushed off with barely a second look from the six other girls I live with. Or that most of them like to party, drink, and screw, usually in that order, whenever they get the chance to.
But I’d endure. I have nowhere else to go in this godforsaken town thanks to my spontaneous decision to get my life together and have no room to judge what Sydney is currently doing in the confines of her bedroom. I’ve done far worse, far more times, I’m sure of it.
Groaning when I drag myself out of bed, I throw on my typical Bea’s Bakery attire, blue jeans and a black long-sleeve shirt that has the business’s cartoon bee logo flying around a cupcake across the chest and slide a brush through my faded blue hair. I’m lucky Beatrice Olsen, the elderly woman who owns the bakery here in Lindon, New York, hasn’t asked me to dye it back to my natural color. The brown copper color my hair used to be had natural red and caramel highlights in the sunlight, a unique mixture my mother used to tell me she envied because it took a lot of money at salons to produce the same results.
No longer is my hair a mixture of my parents’—my mother’s pretty copper and my father’s chocolate brown. The long locks I desperately need to cut soon are one of the few things I can change about myself. It’s a chance to be someone else even temporarily, an identity of my own, unattached to my past or the people I walked away from.
It’s barely seven in the morning when I slip upstairs, ignoring the moans coming from the only other door off the kitchen besides mine, and focus on grabbing my Starbucks iced coffee from the fridge and leaving before my housemate and her hookup are done.
There haven’t been many times where people have bothered me since I moved in back in July. The large white two-story Victorian is well known around campus as the place to party. Unfortunately, that means a lot of guests stay overnight—hookups, people too drunk to drive, and the occasional significant other pop up from time to time when I’m not locked in my room.
Raine, the only girl here who acts like I don’t have fleas, and her boyfriend Caleb are two people I tolerate. The few times I’ve been hassled by one of my roommate’s hookups it’s always Caleb that gets them to leave me alone.