Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Kimberly Kirberger Read Free Book Online

and played hopscotch with my sister, and that night I sang louder than ever in the shower.
Becca Woolf
     

Page 34
Inside
Bottled up inside 
Are the words I never said, 
The feelings that I hide, 
The lines you never read.
You can see it in my eyes, 
Read it on my face: 
Trapped inside are lies 
Of the past I can't replace.
With memories that linger 
Won't seem to go away. 
Why can't I be happier? 
Today's a brand-new day.
Yesterdays are over, 
Even though the hurting's not. 
Nothing lasts forever, 
I must cherish what I've got.
Don't take my love for granted, 
For soon it will be gone 
All you ever wanted 
Of the love you thought you'd won.
     

Page 35
The hurt I'm feeling now 
Won't disappear overnight, 
But someway, somehow, 
Everything will turn out all right,
No more wishing for the past. 
It wasn't meant to be. 
It didn't seem to last, 
So I have to set him free.
Melissa Collette
     

Page 36
Lost Love
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch
I don't know why I should tell you this. I'm nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing has happened to me my whole life that hasn't happened to nearly everybody else on this planet.
Except that I met Rachel.
We met at school. We were locker neighbors, sharing that same smell of fresh notebook paper and molding tennis shoes, with clips of our favorite musicians taped inside our locker doors.
She was beautiful and had that self-assurance that told me she must be going with somebody. Somebody who was somebody in school. MeI'm struggling, trying to stay on the track team and make good enough grades to get into the college my folks went to when they were my age.
The day I met Rachel, she smiled and said hello. After looking into her warm brown eyes, I just had to get out
     

Page 37
and run like it was the first and last run of my life. I ran ten miles that day and hardly got winded.
We spent that fall talking and joking about teachers, parents and life in general, and what we were going to do when we graduated. We were both seniors, and it was great to feel like a "top dog" for a while. It turns out she wasn't dating anybodywhich was amazing. She'd broken up with somebody on the swim team over the summer and wasn't going out at all.
I never knew you could really talk to somebodya girl, I meanthe way I talked with her.
So one day my carit's an old beat-up car my dad bought me because it could never go very fastwouldn't start. It was one of those gray, chilly fall days, and it looked like rain. Rachel drove up beside me in the school parking lot in her old man's turquoise convertible and asked if she could take me somewhere.
I got in. She was playing the new David Byrne CD and singing along to it. Her voice was pretty, a lot prettier than Byrne'sbut then, he's a skinny dude, nothing like Rachel. "So where do you want to go?" she asked, and her eyes had a twinkle like she knew something about me I didn't.
"To the house, I guess," I said, then got up the guts to add, "unless you want to stop by Sonic first."
She didn't answer yes or no, but drove straight to the drive-in restaurant. I got her something to eat and we sat and talked some more. She looked at me with those brown eyes that seemed to see everything I felt and thought. I felt her fingers on my lips and knew I would never feel any more for a girl than I did right then.
We talked and she told me about how she'd come to live in this town, how her dad had been a diplomat in Washington and then retired and wanted her, all of a sudden, to grow up like a small-town girl, but it was too late. She was sophisticated and poised and always seemed
     

Page 38
to know what to say. Not like me. But she opened up something in me.
She liked me, and suddenly I liked myself.
She pointed to her windshield. "Look," she said,