First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances by Julia Kent Read Free Book Online

you’ve got $35 a month for a basic plan—and dialed the number. I got a machine, some woman, so I left a message just saying that Liam had given me her number, and that I was interested in applying for the job. Entertainment... probably some DJ thing, or helping set up and break down for a crew, whatever. I didn’t care. I needed money.
    I wasn’t exactly a trust fund kid. Dad had cut me off in more ways than just financial the day I lost that debate to Amy. I’d moved out and pinged between Trevor and Joe’s houses. Both had been nice enough—or, at least, their parents had been nice enough—to let me live out my senior year. My school district never knew. My dad apparently covered up the fact that I didn’t live at home. Couldn’t have the flock thinking that there was something wrong with their shepherd, right?
    “You are a bull!” Darla shouted.
    I looked at the counter, reached in my front pocket; three bucks and a debit card for an account with $17 left in it. We wouldn’t get paid for last night’s gig for at least a month. Fuck! I grabbed some earbuds, shoved the cord into my phone and found whatever the first song was on my playlist. The combination of Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Nickelback could kill anything, could override whatever tortured fun was taking place in the other room. All I could do this morning was scrub that pan, make my eggs, and wait.
    Amy
    The thing about living in the city is that everything is right there . You can walk out of your front door and hop on the T to some other part of the city or across the river to Cambridge. You can walk a block and hit three different restaurants of three different ethnicities. Fifteen different buskers playing eleven different instruments can give you music free—of course, they’d love it if you throw them some sort of recompense for their effort and I tried, until I finally figured out that I wasn’t able to help everybody.
    That was a major revelation for me—not the busker part. The idea that you can’t help everybody.
    This morning I was avoiding my mom’s early morning call—ever since I moved out she made it a point to call at least once a day and text a couple times. Nothing had changed. Everything was about my nineteen year old brother. Evan this and Evan that and Evan. Evan. Evan. Evan .
    Evan was the golden boy—and had been for years—except, how many golden boys are on their second year of detox? This was our family secret. You see, Mom was the high school guidance counselor and having a son with an addiction problem was something that she just didn’t want to admit. Of course, having him show up at school drunk his senior year made it really hard to remain Cleopatra—the Queen of Denial.
    I’d known since he was eleven or twelve when he’d find older eighth and ninth graders to supply him with beer from their older brothers and sisters. He’d even tried me but there was no way—I was the good little girl. I didn’t do that. And besides, who would I go to? I didn’t even know who the drug dealers were at school or who could hook you up with a six pack of beer.
    That was a world I had no interest in. My nose was in a book, on the Internet doing research, and involved in academic pursuits. That’s where I excelled—that’s where I was Mrs. Smithson’s daughter. The good little girl. Maybe I ruined it for Evan—I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly going to let myself be wracked with guilt over that considering the fact that he was first caught drunk when he was twelve and ever since then, for the past six years, two out of three sentences that came out of my mom’s mouth involved the word Evan.
    It had become a form of profanity to me.
    The day that I graduated from high school, Evan got shitfaced and threw up all over my cake that was set up for my graduation party. “Thank God,” my mom said, “he hadn’t done it in public.” And we were able to clean up the mess and quickly buy a new one. But you