The Simplicity in Chaos Read online

  The Simplicity in Chaos

  (Simply Chaos Series, #1)

  Jessica Sorensen

  The Simplicity in Chaos

  Jessica Sorensen

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Sorensen

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

  No part of this book can be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without the permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Any trademarks, service marks, product names or names featured are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if we use one of these terms.

  For information: jessicasorensen.com

  Cover Design by MaeIDesign

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  Also by Jessica Sorensen

  One

  I’ve always had a pretty normal life. Is it perfect? No, not at all. But, is anything really perfect?

  Still, imperfections and all, saying goodbye to the life I lived for the last seventeen years hasn’t been easy. I’m not ready to let go yet, not ready to accept what everyone keeps telling me. That my parents are gone. That no one has a clue as to where they disappeared. That they might not come back.

  I’ve heard rumors around town that they could be dead. That maybe they got into trouble with the wrong people and were murdered. That they overdosed on drugs. I refuse to accept any of those theories, even though my parents did have a knack for getting in trouble.

  They’ll be fine. I know they will.

  I’m not going to say goodbye yet.

  This is only temporary. Your parents will either be found or come back. Don’t freak out, Sky.

  Just stay calm.

  Reach a state of Zen.

  Unfortunately, my friends are freaking out, which is complicating my attempt at reaching a state of Zen.

  We’re parked at the town park with the windows rolled down, although the temperature is pushing below freezing. But it’s either freeze our asses off or let Nina, my best friend since grade school, get grounded for stinking up her mom’s car with cigarette smoke. Again.

  “This fucking sucks.” Nina takes a drag off her cigarette. Wisps of her short, blonde hair blow in her face as she balances the cigarette between her lips while zipping up her jacket. “Can’t you just keep living in your house or something? You’re a senior in high school, for fuck’s sake—you’re old enough to take care of yourself.”

  Gage, my other BFF, rolls his eyes then tugs his beanie lower onto his head. “That’s not how it works, hon. They have laws and shit.” He leans over the console and steals the cigarette from her.

  Gage doesn’t consider himself a smoker because he never lights up or buys packs, always bumming off half-lit ones from other people. But if he actually took the time to add up all those half cigarettes he inhales, it’d probably tally up to more than Nina’s half a pack a day. Telling him that is a moot point, though.

  Gage thinks what he thinks, and there’s no changing his mind. I like that about him. He does what he wants, speaks his opinions, and doesn’t care what other people think. Part of me wishes I could be like him—more outspoken, bolder, less self-conscious. Unfortunately, I don’t usually speak up when I’m surrounded by more than a couple of people. I blame this partly on being an only child. I never really learned how to deal with large groups and the chaos that comes with it. Then again, Nina is an only child, too, and she’s about as blunt as they come, so maybe it’s just me.

  “Maybe if you talk to a lawyer, you can figure out a way to get guardianship of yourself,” Nina suggests while restlessly flicking her lighter on and off.

  “It’s called emancipation.” Gage relaxes back in the seat with the cigarette between his fingers. “And Sky might’ve been able to do that if her parents didn’t have a will that gave guardianship over her to someone else. But they do, so …” He frowns.

  The two of them have been bummed out for a few days now, ever since I announced the news that I had to move to another town to live with some family that my dad was apparently close to, although I’ve never met them.

  I’m not thrilled about the relocation, but the lawyer in charge of my parents’ will made it pretty clear that I don’t have a choice. Even if I did, I can’t afford the rent to keep living at my parents’ house. So, not only am I moving, but I have to pack up the house and put everything in a storage unit. The real shitty part is my parents have only been missing for a couple of weeks, and I’m supposed to just what? Pack up and move to a town over three hours away? How can I keep searching for them if I’m not here in Honeyton? Plus, this is where I grew up. Honeyton is all I know and leaving it behind is freaking me out. But, in typical Skylin fashion, I’ve kept a lot of my worry bottled up.

  My mom used to tell me, if I didn’t stop doing that, one day I was going to have a panic attack. I wish I could stop, but so far, I haven’t been able to break the habit.

  “Her parents haven’t even been found dead yet,” Nina grumbles as she reaches for her pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. Then she suddenly pauses, her worried gaze flicking to me. “Sky, I’m so fucking sorry. That was totally insensitive.”

  I zip up my leather jacket and prop my boots up on the dash, remaining calm. Because calm is easier than actually feeling what I feel. “You’re fine.” I hug my arms around myself as the winter air seeps into my bones. “My parents aren’t dead, just missing. I tried to point that out to the lawyer, but he said I didn’t have a choice. My parents have a will, and that will states that, until I’m eighteen, if anything should happen to them, I have to go live with these Everettson people.” I rest my head against the headrest and take a deep breath to steady my heart rate. “What I don’t get is why they put these people on the will when I’ve never even met them before.”

  Gage inhales from the cigarette. “Aren’t you related to them?”

  I shake my head. “No. The father is supposedly my dad’s best friend. But, how can they be that great of friends if I’ve never even heard of him?”

  It’s been bugging me since the lawyer told me. Why would my parents decide to leave me with people I don’t know? Then again, the only remaining relative still alive is my mom’s sister, who I haven’t ever met. From what I understand, she currently lives at some mountain retreat with a bunch of middle-aged, free-spirited people who believe in a simplistic lifestyle. When my mom told me this, I stated that it sounded an awful lot like a cult. She only laughed and patted my head, saying, “One day, you’ll understand why not everyone wants to live in this modern day, technology-driven world.” Maybe she was right, but right now, I can’t even imagine parting with my cell phone or laptop.

  “Don’t you have someone you’re related to that you can go live with?” Gage asks, flicking the cigarette out the window.

  I shut my eyes, the chilly air burning my lungs, then I gradually exhale. “Just my aunt. But I… I don’t even know how to get a hold of her or I would’ve tried already.” I would’ve tried the day I realized my parents weren’t coming back from the bar.<
br />
  They had told me they were going to go out for a while to get a couple of drinks at the bar a few blocks down from our neighborhood. That was nothing new. My parents usually spent Saturday nights drinking there with their friends.

  They left around nine o’clock at night, and I fell asleep around midnight. When I woke up around ten the next morning, their bed was empty and still made, which I thought was odd but not completely out of the ordinary. There had been a couple of times when they’d gotten too drunk and passed out at a friend’s house. And sometimes they’d take off for a few days to go on road trips, but they usually checked in when they did that.

  Around three o’clock on Monday, after two days of not hearing from them, I started making calls to everyone I could think of. No one had seen them since early Saturday morning. Not even at the bar.

  When I realized they’d never made it to the bar, I panicked. After I took a few shots of vodka to calm the hell down, I called the police.

  It was another twenty-four hours before I could fill out a police report and so far, that’s about all that’s happened. Well, except for me finding out that I have to move in with a strange family. I’ll admit, I’m worried. But the only way I can get out of moving in with them is if my parents simply return home or the police find them. The latter seems unlikely since, so far, the police have only asked around town and did a quick search through the house. None of the evidence they found indicated any signs of foul play.

  I overheard an officer telling another officer that he thought my parents had just bailed on me. When I told him he was wrong, he looked at me with pity and said, “Kid, as much as I hate to say this, you might not know your parents as well as you think you do. A lot of kids don’t.”

  I got what he was saying, but that doesn’t mean I believe him. Sure, I live on the other side of the railroad tracks, the lower-class area of Honeyton where the drug and crime rates are higher, but that doesn’t mean my parents would just bail on me.

  They’re decent enough parents. They have jobs. They put a roof over my head and food on the table. And yeah, they aren’t home a lot, but they’d never just leave me.

  Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better, though, because it means something bad has more than likely happened to them.

  I suck in a breath as tears sting my eyes.

  Crap. I need to calm down.

  I inhale another deep breath, then another.

  “Earth to Sky.” Gage waves his hand in front of my face.

  I open my eyes. “Yeah?”

  “You seriously spaced out for, like, five minutes straight.”

  “Sorry,” I apologize. “I was just thinking about stuff.”

  Gage and Nina trade a concerned look, and then Nina’s gaze zeroes in on me. “You know what I think we need?”

  “A time machine so I can fast-forward six months into the future to when I turn eighteen?” I crack a joke.

  She cranks up the defroster. “Nope. Although, that’d be awesome.”

  “Yes, it would.” I straighten in the seat and lower my feet to the floorboard. “So, what do we need?”

  She gives me a sly smile. “What’s the one thing that you’ve been wanting to do but have never had the balls to go through with?”

  As I figure out what she means, I hastily shake my head. “Nope, not going to do it.”

  “Aw, come on, Sky.” She taps the steering wheel with her palm. “This might be your last chance.”

  “Yeah, the last chance to humiliate myself.” The last thing I need right now is to stress myself out more.

  She steers onto the icy road and toward the center of town. “You won’t know that until you try.”

  “I may not know how it’ll go down, but I have a pretty good idea of how it’ll end.” I roll up my window and recline back in my seat. “With me talking to him and then looking like a loser when he laughs in my face.”

  She pops the end of a cigarette into her mouth and signals for me to light it for her. “Dude, Grey so messed up your head.”

  I pick up the lighter and flick it on. “This isn’t about Grey.” That might be a lie.

  Truthfully, I’m not sure if I’m just shy around guys or if Grey’s overdramatic rejection of my dance invite—Nina’s idea, not mine—in eighth grade permanently dented my self-esteem. And when I say overdramatic rejection, I mean he turned me down for the dance by standing up on the lunchroom table in front of the entire eighth grade and announced it to everyone. Even worse, I reacted by crying.

  Yeah, thanks for that, Grey.

  Still, I can’t blame my lack of a dating life completely on him.

  Dating sometimes leads to falling for someone, which can lead to heartbreak, and I’d rather not have to go through that.

  Of course, it doesn’t help that after Grey turned me down, he’s spent years relentlessly tormenting me, along with his friends. While I try to avoid him as much as possible and he generally doesn’t bother me when I’m around Nina and Gage, there have been a couple of incidents where he’s tormented me pretty badly

  As for the guy Nina wants me to talk to right now, I’m unsure if he’s an asshole or a nice guy, since I know nothing about him, not even his name or if he even lives in Honeyton. The only thing I do know is he visits the auto shop on the corner of Main Center Street and Winter Mourning Road every Friday evening around four o’clock, right when I’m heading home from school. I’m not certain what he does there or how long he stays there, just that he goes there. That’s it. Well, that and he’s extremely good-looking and mysterious, but the latter might only be because of my lack of information on him.

  “You know Grey’s a jerk, right? He’s a cocky, arrogant douchebag who loves to humiliate women.” She inhales then exhales a cloud of smoke. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard him putting down a girl or slut-shaming them? He’s probably done it to at least half the girls in our school.”

  I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “I already told you this isn’t about Grey.”

  She removes the cigarette from her lips and gives me a disbelieving look. “Do you understand, though, that Grey’s just an ass? Because, if you did understand that, I think you’d be more willing to do this.”

  Gage squeezes my shoulder. “Don’t listen to her. If you don’t want to do it, don’t.” He reclines back in the seat. “Don’t let her use her peer pressure bullshit on you.”

  She throws him a glare from over her shoulder. “I’m not trying to peer pressure her. I just think talking to this guy might be easier for her if she understands that she’ll never have to see him again. And it might help her get over her fear of rejection.” She looks at me. “But, if you don’t want to, just tell me to shut the fuck up.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I say with a small smile. Deep down, I know she has a point.

  Ever since the fiasco with Grey, I’ve been afraid and have never dated anyone. I’ve never even kissed a guy.

  Besides, I could use the distraction from the constant worrying of where the hell my parents are. As long as I don’t panic while talking to this guy, everything should be okay. What would I even have to panic about? Nina is right. I’ll never see him again.

  “You know what? Let’s do it.” I glance at the clock. “If we leave now, we should get there right as he’s showing up.”

  “Really?” Nina perks up.

  I nod. “Yeah, really.”

  “Awesome.” Grinning, she steers the car toward the shop.

  I grin back, but my stomach kickflips. God, I really hope I can keep my shit together for this.

  Two

  “Maybe this was a stupid idea,” I mutter as Nina pulls into the auto body shop’s parking lot a couple of spaces away from his 1968 Chevelle.

  Usually, I only see the mysterious stranger when we’re driving home from school. The first time I spotted him was a couple of months ago when I was walking home. Nina had been sick that day, and Gage had afterschool detention.

  The distance from
my school to home is about five miles, and I had decided to trek on foot instead of suffering through a bus ride. I don’t mind walking, but I’d worn uncomfortable shoes that day and was cursing my decision. But then I had spotted the mystery guy and was sort of glad I had opted to walk, even if my boots were dirty, evil bastards that made my feet bleed.

  As a fan of classic cars, his vehicle was what drew my attention first. But then he had climbed out of the car, and I immediately became distracted by him.

  Tall and lean with short, dark hair, he wore all black, a chain dangled from his belt loop, and he had a couple of tattoos inked on his arms. Even from afar, I could tell he was good-looking, but that wasn’t what made me keep watching him.

  It was the way he rounded to the back of his car, leaned against the trunk, and lowered his head into his hands, as if he was crying. I started to feel awful for him.

  I might have stuck around and struck up a conversation to see if he was okay, if Grey hadn’t driven by and shouted something foul at me.

  After that, I hightailed my ass home.

  I thought I’d never see the stranger again, but then, the next Friday, his car was parked at the auto body shop again.

  It became like clockwork after that. Every single Friday, his car is at the shop and sometimes he’s standing out by it. I don’t know who he is or why he goes there. While he looks around my age, he doesn’t go to my school, so he either graduated already, dropped out, or he lives somewhere else.

  “You need to throw up before you do this?” Nina asks as she shuts off the engine. “You look pale as shit.”

  “Shit’s not pale.” I grin nervously as I sit up straight in the seat and peer out the window at his car, trying to keep a grasp on my nervousness. He’s just a guy. Chill out, Sky. You’re never going to see him after this. “He’s not even out here.”