The Girl in the Love Song (Lost Boys 1)

Feels so good and feels so weak

This love cuts until I bleed

Don’t touch me, baby, don’t look at my scars,

Until you want to know which ones are yours

All I’ll ever want

All I’ll ever want

Is you and me

Don’t know how lost you are

Until you’re found

you can’t see the road, when the rain’s comin’ down

You call me home

I’ll take you to bed

Turn off the light and I’ll pretend that you said

I fell in love with you tonight

Feels so good and feels so weak

This love cuts until I bleed

Don’t touch me, baby, don’t look at my scars,

Until you want to know which ones are yours

All I’ll ever want

All I’ll ever want

Is you to fall in love with me tonight

Chapter Three

The first day of senior year. I’d have plenty of first days of classes to come—years’ worth in undergrad and med school—but this was the last year of high school. Shiloh was fond of pointing out how ridiculously excited I got about the first day of school when everyone else was bemoaning the end of summer.

“Like a rite of passage,” I murmured, as I dressed in skinny jeans and an off-the-shoulder, waist-length sweatshirt.

I studied myself in the mirror. The jeans highlighted my curves more than I was used to but otherwise seemed plain. But in choosing my outfit for the day, Evelyn had warned me not to make it look like I was trying too hard.

“You’re naturally stunning, you bitch,” she’d told me, laughing, while we shopped at the King’s Village Shopping Center the week before. “Just show off that ass of yours, and no one will give a crap what else you’re wearing.”

I turned in front of the mirror that morning in my bedroom, lips pursed. Two years ago, Evelyn Gonzalez and her crew of popular friends hadn’t paid me a second glance. But a friend from my soccer team took me to a beach party last year. Somehow, I ended up in the sandy-floored bathroom, comforting a crying Evelyn who’d just broken up with Chance Blaylock, her boyfriend of six months.

“You’re really sweet,” she’d said, dabbing her eyes. “Most girls at school would be thrilled to see me like this. Weak and pathetic.”

“You’re not either,” I said gently. “You’re human.”

Something in those words must’ve touched the Queen Bee because suddenly she was looping her arm in mine and introducing me to her friends. Which included River Whitmore. I still hadn’t the guts to talk to him, but whenever I hung out with them that summer, we exchanged smiles and once he bought me a shake at the Burger Barn. True, he’d been buying everyone a shake, but it felt nice to be included. A high school experience a bookish girl like me would never have imagined.