On the Edge

by Third Cousins

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Discover More Books By Third Cousins

  A Synopsis & Table Of Contents...

  Inspiring Words

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Copyright

  Twisted

  On the Edge

  Book 1

  Coming Of Age Romance

  By: Danica Reid & Third Cousins

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  A SYNOPSIS & TABLE OF CONTENTS...

  Jason has known Sophie since pre-school, although Sophie didn’t even know who he was until their second year of high school. When Jason’s father leaves after having an affair, he turns to food for comfort. Sophie is quick to spot his weight gain and ensures that the next few years of his life are hell.

  Jason has one thing to look forward to, though: college. It’s a chance to start fresh and create a cooler version of the person he used to be. He spends all summer getting back into shape and things finally seem to be going his way, until a familiar face shows up and brings everything crashing down around him.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Discover More Books By Third Cousins

  Inspiring Words

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  DISCOVER MORE BOOKS BY THIRD COUSINS

  Copyright

  INSPIRING WORDS

  “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

  - George Bernard Shaw

  CHAPTER 1

  Sophie Jameson was not the kind of girl you took home to meet your mom. At least, she wasn’t the kind of girl I’d take home to meet mine. Sophie Jameson was the embodiment of rebellion. When we had started our last year of middle school, she’d gone in on the very first day with bright pink hair. It was the same kind of pink cloud that you could get on a stick from the cotton-candy vendor at the carnival.

  Maybe in a city her bright-pink hair wouldn’t have been headline news. Maybe in a city she would have blended in with the rest of the kids desperately trying to stand out from the trend-setters by following even weirder trends. We didn’t live in a city, though. We lived in a small town in Texas, about ten miles away from falling across the border into Mexico. In our school girls had mousy brown hair, or maybe blonde, if it wasn't black black. Sophie was the only girl in our entire school who didn’t fit that pattern.

  She was a troublemaker. I’m sure that the trouble she caused wasn’t anything to do with her hairstyle choices, but it sure made it difficult for her to be stealthy about it. When we graduated from middle school, we ended up at the same high school. I doubt she would be able to tell you that, though. I don’t think she had any idea who I was until our second year.

  It had all started for me in the summer. My mom had sat me down one evening, when I’d got back in from a day out at the beach. I could still smell the salty spray in my hair as I sat down at the kitchen table and looked over at my mom’s tired face. I knew that something wasn’t right. I could tell from the way that she was looking at me. She was hesitant to tell me at first. I don’t think she wanted to see me unhappy. She did tell me though. She told me everything.

  My father left the house that night. It was like once the truth was out; he simply couldn’t wait to leave. I was still in shock. I could hear a goading voice at the back of my mind telling me to lash out at him before it was too late, but I couldn’t even open my mouth. He didn’t look at me once as he packed away his suitcases into the back of his car and slammed the lid down over them. I’d like to think that it was because of guilt. I’d like to think that he was starting to realize that sleeping with his secretary hadn’t been worth losing his family over. But we soon learned that he had gone straight over from our house to her place. That's where he’d been living ever since.

  My mom was miserable. My childhood destroyed. I don’t know if you know this, but watching the two people who are meant to lead you through life fall apart pretty much shatters any expectations of a happy life that you might have been holding. My parents were my guides. They were my inspiration, but then they broke and everything broke with them.

  When I started my second year of high school, I’d put on 56 pounds. I’d watched it slowly creeping over my frame all summer, but I couldn’t stop it. My parents were broken. My mom looked as though she might never fix herself, and that left a void so big and empty in my life that all I could do was try to fill it. In hindsight, perhaps food wasn’t the way forward, but at the time it offered some comfort in a world that otherwise felt hopeless.

  It was after my weight gain that Sophie Jameson first noticed me. She’d gone back to school with her hair dyed a bright cherry red. The summer, it seemed, had taken away my innocence in one way and hers in another, because her chest had started to push forward and there were curves where there hadn’t been only a few months before.

  We’d been in the hallway. Her locker was pretty close to mine and her hair had caught my eye. Her hair matched her lipstick and her lipstick would have made a fire truck look drab. She obviously felt my gaze. She turned to look at me, her eyes slowly filling with disgust as she acknowledged me for the first time in her life.

  “What are you staring at you fat perve?” she snapped at me with a smirk spreading across her lips.

  I didn’t say anything. In truth, I was in shock. She’d never spoken to me before. She’d never even looked in my direction. She didn’t know who I was. She didn’t know anything about me, but she’d felt it was okay to attack me verbally. I stepped back and closed my locker, as I dropped my eyes to the floor. I’d never been called fat before. I’d always been pretty slim. My cheeks burned red and I waited for her to leave, before I dared to look back up.

  That was the first time that Sophie Jameson realized that I existed. She spent the next three years of my life taunting me. I was sure that she stayed up at night, scribbling away in some hatred notebook about me. In my vision she had a mad look in her eyes as she cackled over the new fat joke that she’d created and couldn’t wait to test out.

  Yes, Sophie Jameson was an undeniable beauty, but only on the outside. I had to be grateful to her in a small way, though, because she taught me that what’s on the inside matters a hell of a lot more than what’s on the outside.

  CHAPTER 2

  College was my fresh start. I’d managed to get into a place in California. Over the summer I’d forced myself to stick to a strict diet. It was the worst few months of my life. I basically had to cut out all food that had any taste. It was worth it in the end, though. With the combined efforts of my diet and exercise I’d managed to lose all the weight which I’d been carrying since my family had fallen apart.

  I felt better than I had done in years. For the first time in a long time, I could look in the mirror without feeling revolted by the reflection that stared back at me. I was ready to move on with my own life. I was ready to become my own person, away from the shadow of my mom’s grief and my father’s betrayal.

  When I got to college, I found out that I would be sharing my dorm room. This kind of excited me a bit. I’m an only child and I never really had sleepovers, so the idea of sharing a room seemed kind of mysterious and fun.

  The guy who I was sharing the room with was already there when I got there. He’d picked the right side of t
he room without consulting me and was bent over stocking the shared fridge with cans of beer when I walked in.

  “Sup,” he said as he turned to look at me.

  “Not much,” I said, as I my bags down on my bed. The instant relief as the straps released their death grip hold on me was almost better than sex. Not that I could really make that comparison at the time.

  “Is this your first year?” I asked, when he turned back to his task of filling the fridge.

  “Yeah man, just moved over from North Carolina,” he put the last can in the fridge and then stood up. He hadn’t needed to tell me that he was from the south though. I could hear the slow southern twang that ran its melodic fingers through each and every syllable that he spoke. “You’re from Texas right?” he asked with a proud smirk.

  “Sure am,” I nodded.

  “Are you a total crank about the lord, then?” he asked, as he reopened the fridge and took out a can, which hadn’t been in the fridge long enough to actually be considered cold. He pulled the ring on it and the quiet room filled with the hissing of gas, as it desperately evacuated from the prison it had been held in.

  “If you’re going to be asking questions like that then I’m going to need one of them,” I tilted my head, to the beer in his hand.

  “Help yourself, man,” the guy said with a grin. “I’m Dillan, by the way.”

  I grabbed a beer out of the fridge, trying to seem as cool as a college kid should be. “Jason,” I said. “So, what classes are you taking?” I wanted to see whether we’d be taking any together.

  He reached up and ran his fingers through the dark blond hair that flowed down past his ears. His eyebrows pulled together in thought. I hadn’t realized that my question had been a difficult one to answer. Finally he shrugged. “I came on a football scholarship.”

  “Are you serious? You have no idea what classes you are taking?”

  “My coach sorted all that out for me,” Dillan said, as though his future was nothing to be concerned about. “Don’t we get, like, I don’t know, timetables or something, so we know where we’re going and what classes we have and stuff?” he had a worried look on his face, as though for the first time he was realizing that he was at college with no idea about what he was doing there.

  “I think so,” I said quickly, so that my new-found friend could stop panicking. “We get, like, a welcome pack, I think.”

  The look of relief on Dillan’s face was almost comical. It was like the stress just literally dropped away. “Cool,” he breezed, as though the panic had never even been there to begin with. “What are you taking, anyway?”

  I’d put a lot of thought into what I was going to college to study. My father had done well with life. He had his own business providing industrial cleaning equipment to factories and warehouses, but I had no desire to follow in his footsteps. My mom hadn’t done much with her life. She’d spoken a lot about painting when I’d been a kid, but I’ve seen my mom’s drawings, and the only A she got was for the effort.

  “I’m taking advanced Calculus and Architecture,” I told him.

  “Dude,” he wrinkled his nose, as though my words had just offended his sense of smell. For the briefest of moments I wondered whether it was my breath. “You’re such a geek. Why would you take math? That’s all numbers and impossible shit like that.”

  “I like math,” I shrugged.

  “No one likes math,” Dillan said with such certain determination that I doubted myself for a moment. He was wrong, though. I did like math. “If you want to get laid here, then do not tell chicks you’re taking math,” he advised me. He leaned forward a little and grinned at me. “Trust me.”

  I scoffed. He was wrong. Plenty of girls liked smart guys. I wasn’t bothered about getting laid anyway. Well, I was, but by my girlfriend, not some random girl who thought that math was a turn-off.

  “You know, I’ve got a girlfriend,” I told him, so he would stop thinking that I needed advice or whatever.

  “Does she know that you’re taking math?” he asked with a serious expression.

  “Yes,” I said dryly.

  “Dude, you two are freaks,” he grinned. “It’s a good job you found each other.” He tipped the last of the beer from his can into his mouth, before throwing it at the trash can and missing.

  “You play football?” The shot hadn’t been a hard one to make.

  “It’s been a long summer, I’ll be back in shape in no time,” he said, brushing me off. “That’s why we go to training.”

  CHAPTER 3

  College was everything that I had thought it would be. It was my fresh start. Nobody who knew me there had any idea of the person I’d been back home. They only knew the version of me that I allowed them to see, the version that was cool and funny. It was important to me to keep it that way. It was important to keep the two different sides of my life as far apart as possible. I wasn’t sure what it was that I was afraid of, but the idea of everybody finding out that I hadn’t always been the outgoing, funny guy they knew seemed earth-shattering.

  “Dude,” Dillan said to me, as we walked along a path flooded with sunshine and choked with girls with more skin on show than clothing. I felt his elbow make contact with my ribs, as a sharp pain filled the left side of my body.

  I twisted away from him and looked over in the direction that his eyes were leading me to. “Look at her. She’s hot, right? Oh god, she’s so hot that I’m my pants are getting tight,” he pulled down at his crotch, as though to prove his point. “We need to go over. I need to introduce myself.”

  He was right. The girl sitting in the shade of the willow tree’s branches was hot. She was wearing tiny denim jeans that showed the line of her ass. Her legs were toned, tanned, long, and could put a super-model’s to shame. The rest of her only got better. Her toned stomach was on show because of the tiny crop top she was wearing. Her cleavage peeped over the top with such eagerness that I was sure it would be impossible to hide, no matter what the garment. Her plump cherry lips were pursed together, as though she was thinking about something which had no simple answer. Her hair was bright purple. Her beauty couldn’t fool me, even if it did cast a shadow over the stars.

  “You don’t want to go there,” I warned Dillan. I quickly put my arm out in front of him. His body had already started to lean towards her. I could see the journey playing across his eyes, as his mind walked over to her and introduced itself to her. “She’s not worth it.”

  “You know her?” Dillan asked with almost an offensive amount of surprise.

  “Kind of. We went to the same school.”

  “Oh, so you don’t actually know her, then,” he said, as the world became right again in his eyes.

  I glared at him. Why was I even warning him? Maybe he deserved to feel what it was like to try and survive in the center of a hurricane? “I know her well enough to tell you that’s she not worth it,” I said in one last attempt at saving my friend from the beauty the devil was offering him.

  “You’re only saying that because you never got any,” Dillan said with a smirk. It wasn’t a cruel smirk. I could tell that he was only winding me up, but that didn’t stop the line from being crossed.

  “Do whatever you want then,” I shrugged. “Just don’t say that I didn’t warn you.”

  “There’s no need to be such a granddad.”

  I dug my hands into my jeans pockets and shrugged. “Do whatever, man.”

  I turned back and looked at her. I’d thought that college was going to be a fresh start. I’d thought I’d recreated myself, but I guess the only certain thing about happiness is that it can be taken away from you in an instant. Sophie Jameson. The girl who had shown me that beauty was the greatest manipulator of them all, was sitting underneath the willow tree.

  “You coming over?” Dillan asked as I dropped my arm so he could go over and introduce himself.

  I hesitated. There was no getting away from her now. If Dillan was successful in his pursuit, I wouldn’t be able
to avoid her for long. “I guess.”

  I really didn’t want to. I could feel the new me that I’d been starting to build falling apart with every step I took towards her. By the time our shadows had crossed and she looked up, I felt like the fat kid I’d been in high school all over again.

  Her purple hair shifted, as her head turned in my direction. Her eyes were covered with big, reflective sunglasses that sat on top of her pretty button nose. Her hand swept through the air and pulled the glasses down slightly, so she could look over the shaded protection they offered her.

  “Do I know you?” she asked with a slightly frustrated expression, as though she was trying to place where she had seen me before.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to say. When I’d seen her sitting on the field, I’d been sure that she would recognize me straight away if she saw me. How could she not? She’d spent three years of her life torturing me. I still had the images in my mind of her being bent over her hate books with pictures of me on her walls, so that she had a place to keep her darts.

  “We went to the same school together,” I said kind of awkwardly. Had it really meant that little to her? Had I really meant that little? She’d tortured me. She’d made me hate my own reflection, which was bad enough without her not even remembering it.

  She nodded slowly. “Sure, I guess that could be it,” she said somewhat doubtfully. That was it. That was where she knew me from.

  I thought about telling her what she did. I thought about reminding her about the things she had said, but Dillan was standing next to me and I quickly realized that if she couldn’t remember me, then she wouldn’t be able to tell everybody about how I had looked before.

  “I’m Sophie,” she said without really looking at me or Dillan.

  “Are you doing anything tonight?” Dillan dove straight in for it. “I was thinking about going to see that new movie about that girl who lives at the beach house,” he said vaguely.