Advice from a Sunflower Read online

  Copyright © 2021 Jen Stevens

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by: Emily at Emily Wittig Designs

  Edited by: Mackenzie at Nice Girl Naughty Edits

  Books by Jen Stevens

  Ugly Truths (Grimville Reapers Book One)

  Untold Truths (Grimville Reapers Book Two)

  Advice from a Sunflower

  For Cecelia

  Contents

  Copyright

  Books by Jen Stevens

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  About the author

  Prologue

  Eli

  I've had two loves in my life.

  You know, that earth-shattering, lay-my-life-on-the-line, knock-entire-cities-down-to-please-her kind of love. The kind that you meet, and your souls release this sigh of relief because you've finally found each other again.

  And I lost them both.

  The first was the proverbial girl next door. She captivated me the instant we met and kept me strung along like a puppet every moment after. It was years before I got to taste her, and it was the most delicious thing I've ever experienced. So, I devoured her. I carped that diem harder than Horace ever intended when he uttered the words.

  It was perfect.

  Until she decided life in our sleepy town wasn't enough. That I wasn't enough. She spread her wings and flew out of my grasp before I could even attempt to convince her not to, and our time together came to a crashing, fiery end.

  She broke me.

  The second love was instant. Zero hesitation. She entered my life, and my heart immediately changed its beat to suit her. She was everything I needed and nothing I deserved. But just as quickly as she'd appeared, she was gone. A flicker of bright light that couldn't withstand the storm raging around her.

  She obliterated me.

  Now, I'm a skeleton of a man, walking the earth without purpose or direction, simply going through the motions. Each day brings on the same mundane schedule and I'm slowly disappearing into the nothingness, my life fading to black.

  Until my first love comes back.

  Her return gives me purpose again, but not in the way it had in the past. No, I'm not the same naive little boy playing nice in the sandbox anymore. I warned her of that the moment I saw her.

  But she didn't take my words seriously. She chose to test me instead—to awaken the sleeping beast and try her luck with him.

  I promised her I'd destroy her and if there is one thing I do well, it's upholding my promises.

  Chapter 1

  Lyla

  8 years old

  Dark clouds gather behind the looming house, a signal for the beginning of the storm the town hasn’t stopped talking about for the past week. The weatherman is expecting flash flooding with torrential downpours on and off for the rest of the week. I count the windows and doors before me, concerned that there aren’t half as many on this house as there were on Grandma and Grandpa’s.

  Three windows and one back door. That’s it. That’s the only opening to the rest of the world that’s offered to us in our new home. I’m claustrophobic just looking at it. Even with the sky threatening to open itself above me, I still feel safer outside in the backyard than I do inside the old house.

  My mother—she prefers to be called Denise—insists that it isn’t so bad. She’s confident we’ll be able to start over here, but I miss our old apartment over my grandparent’s garage. At least that place didn’t breathe at night, startling me awake with its spooky sounds, or watch me every time I left. Denise says it’s just settling; that’s what old houses do. But I think it’s worse than that. There’s a bad energy in there and I can feel a shift happening between the three of us—her, my sister, Marnie, and me—as we each get settled into our own routines. Our tight-knit family is already starting to fall apart. My mother thinks I’m too young to talk about negative energies or feel suffocated simply by a house but she’s wrong.

  Age doesn’t matter when it comes to things like this.

  There’s a rumor that an old spinster lived there before us, her family leaving it vacant for years before they finally decided to sell to Denise. It’s said that she practiced witchcraft in the basement, often casting spells on the people in town who had mocked her or treated her poorly. That was supposedly why the basement creaked so much at night. That, and Marnie told me she sacrificed children to cast her spells. I'm not sure I believe any of it, but I know something unexplainable is going on.

  “Mouse, get your butt inside before you catch a cold!” Denise yells from the back door, waving her hands around animatedly to grab my attention away from the sky.

  I don’t waste any time, quickly gathering my blanket and copy of The Catcher in the Rye as I realize the rain has already begun to fall, chilling my entire body through all my soaked clothes.

  “What were you thinking?” she scolds once I’m safely inside the sliding door, grabbing at my dripping attire with rough fingers. “Take this off before you track water through the house and ruin my floors.”

  That’s her new thing: calling everything hers.

  Don’t slam her front door. Don’t spill juice on her carpet. Don’t leave a mess in her kitchen.

  Marnie assumes it’s because she’s never had anything that was fully hers before and now that she does; she wants to take full advantage. I think it makes her sound a little selfish. This is supposed to be our house, where we make memories together. That’s what the apartment was, at least.

  Denise grew up here in The Hollow, a small town in the outskirts of Nowhereland that she’s never escaped from. It’s not on the way to anything, so we rarely see people passing through like they show in movies with small towns. It’s just our little community of people, coexisting together and minding everyone else’s business.

  She would tell us stories about how she wanted to pick up and leave the moment she finished high school, claiming the town was too small to hold all her big dreams. She found out she was pregnant with Marnie the week before prom and didn’t tell her parents until graduation, when she had her bags packed and her car gassed up to go. Grandma threw a fit, insisting that she stay to raise the child the right way. Denise finally conceded when her dad pulled the battery out of her car and refused to replace it. She swore she’d leave the second Marnie was in school. Then, she had me.

  Grandma and Grandpa took good care of us, always making sure we had everything we needed and then some. Grandpa fixed up the apartment over their garage a few years ago and Denise moved us in before the paint was dry. I know it broke Grandma’s heart to see us go, even if it was on
ly a few feet away. As it turns out, Denise made the right choice. Grandma couldn’t do much caring for herself, let alone for the three of us, and Grandpa was tied up helping her. They each passed within weeks of each other—her from lung cancer and him from a broken heart. The three of us processed grief in our own ways, but we fought through the best we could together. That was when I noticed the first shift between us, and Denise hasn’t been the same person since.

  She’s never been like most moms in town. She doesn’t dote after Marnie and me. She expects that we take care of ourselves most of the time, especially now that she got her new job as a receptionist at the beauty salon down the street and she can’t rely on her parents to pick up the slack. We’re used to it.

  It’s hard to miss something you never had in the first place, right?

  “There’s a boy next door,” Marnie states once I make my way up the stairs and into our shared bedroom.

  Despite the house seeming enormous, there’s only two large bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, which means Marnie and I are stuck sharing a room again.

  “How old is he?” I ask, rummaging through my dresser for something warm to wear now that I’ve been stripped of all my clothes by Denise. I hope the boy didn’t see her doing that right by the back door.

  “He looks as old as me, and very handsome. I’m going to make him my boyfriend.”

  She flips from her stomach onto her back, resting her head on folded arms.

  I roll my eyes to the ceiling as I slip a shirt over my head. Marnie has gone boy crazy. That’s what Denise calls it. She demands every boy’s attention, even if she doesn’t really like them. Last week, she told me she snuck behind the slide at school and kissed Ryan Atkins, a very disturbing boy we’ve known since kindergarten. The idea of her putting her lips anywhere near him proves that she has definitely gone crazy and that there’s no return in sight.

  After dinner, we settled in for the night—me with a book in hand and Marnie with her face on the TV, zoned out to some new reality show they're airing on MTV. Around nine, Denise peeks her head into our doorway and tells us she’s meeting a few friends for prayer at the only church in town, right down the street. Marnie and I share a look before hesitantly nodding toward her, our eyes cast down in worry.

  “She’s been doing that a lot lately,” Marnie comments, her gaze still fixed on the TV.

  “I know. I wonder what’s so great about that place.”

  “Emma Marshall’s mom goes to the same prayer circle on the weekends, and she sometimes goes to visit. She says it’s a smelly dump. Why would Denise want to risk leaving us home alone to spend so much time in some dump?” Marnie finally tears her eyes from MTV to look at me, her nose scrunched in mock disgust.

  “Beats me,” I say, rolling over toward the wall to get back to my book, signaling the end of our conversation.

  Denise is just going through something. I’m sure losing both your parents so close together is a shock, especially when they were the sole support system you had as a single mother. We would just have to give her time to fight through this rough patch and then things would return back to normal.

  ***

  As it turns out, the boy next door is new to town. He and his parents moved here from California. He didn't look like what I always pictured someone from California to look. His skin is a pale shade of white that I've never seen before and his hair is such a dark brown, I thought it was black until he moved, and I saw the chestnut tint shining in the sun. After his dad was re-stationed in the Army somewhere close by, his mom decided to bring the family back to her hometown so he could have a sense of normalcy in his life.

  I got all this information out of him in between Marnie’s desperate attempts to steal his heart. She twirled her hair around her finger and giggled when he made a weird joke about being something called an "Army Brat" and then pretended to drop a book on the ground that she’d been holding in her arms since we walked over to introduce ourselves. When I saw it was my copy of Jane Eyre, I dove toward it before she had the chance to ask him to grab it, offering her an irritated scowl as she rasped out another fit of unwarranted giggles.

  “That’s a good book,” the boy says, pointing to my hands as I attempt to brush the dirt off the cover.

  “I know. That’s why I keep it safely tucked away on my bookshelf.” I shoot an accusatory glance toward Marnie, who still hasn’t bothered to apologize.

  “What’s your name?” she asks him, ignoring my dirty looks.

  “Eli,” he says proudly, extending his hand in the air between us.

  Marnie and I consider it for a moment, not sure what he’s trying to do until something clicks in my mind and I shove mine up to meet his, shaking with a bit too much pressure. Grandpa once told me a firm handshake makes for a strong first impression. When I finally let his hand free, he wiggles his fingers in front of his face and then slides it in front of Marnie. She smiles and barely touches him, letting out a quiet giggle that has his cheeks blushing.

  “Eli,” my sister coos, as if it’s something she’s never heard before.

  We have an Eli in our school just a couple of grades above us, so I’m not sure why she’s acting so stupid.

  “I’m Marnie, and this is my little sister, Mouse.”

  “Your mom named you Mouse?” he asks, brows knit together in confusion.

  “No, my real name—” I begin to say, but Marnie talks over me and steals his attention back, her voice overpowering mine.

  “Well, that’s what we’ve called her since before she could walk or talk. It’s because she’s as quiet as a mouse.”

  She’s right. No one in town calls me by my real name anymore. Even teachers call out the nickname when they take attendance, and I’ve been forced to accept it.

  He nods, as if that makes total sense. They move on to talking about school before I get a chance to give him my real name, and I sulk off to the side as I realize that just like everyone else, he clearly likes Marnie more than me. She finds out that he’ll be entering our grade when our break ends and that he has the same teacher as me. Marnie didn’t look too happy about that but she quickly recovers, promising him that she’ll introduce him to all her friends, so he doesn’t have to sit alone on his first day.

  Before we know it, the sun has begun to set, and the sky is painted in oranges and purples. I’ve settled down on the grass beside them as they talk back and forth about random things, taking more interest in re-reading the book Marnie stole from me than hearing her go on about how fun the ice cream parlor is to hang out at during the summer or how the public pool is usually overrun by teenagers who shoo us away.

  Whenever they say something that catches my attention, I look up and find Eli staring at me as Marnie drones on about whatever it is before he quickly turns away and picks at his shirt or the grass. Marnie doesn’t notice until he goes to say goodbye and reaches his hand out again for a shake, this time only offering it to me.

  “It was nice to meet you, Miss Mouse,” he says in an English accent, a nod toward the book I’d been reading in front of him all afternoon.

  “You as well, Mr. Eli,” I try to say, stumbling over the words. I’m terrible at accents.

  Marnie snickers, reminding us that she’s there. “You’re funny, Eli. I hope we get to hang out more over break.”

  When we get back to the house, she grabs the house phone and stomps up the stairs.

  “Hi, Mrs. Marshall, can Emma come to the phone?” I hear before our bedroom door slams and I’m left alone in the loud silence.

  I decide that maybe living next door to Eli won’t be so bad.

  Chapter 2

  Lyla

  9 years old

  The summer sun beats down on my back unapologetically, toasting my olive skin into a dark golden brown. Marnie is off somewhere in the house with Emma, avoiding the outdoors at all costs after an extreme sunburn last week on her fair skin that almost landed her in the hospital. I sip my glass of warm water—the ice cubes melt
ed within minutes—and admire Eli’s handiwork on a makeshift cardboard box clubhouse he’s been working on all afternoon.

  His skin is lathered in a thick layer of white sunblock, courtesy of his mom who makes a point to come out every hour and reapply. He begs her not to, but I can see the grateful look on his face every time she walks away, and he knows his snowy white skin will be protected once again. It never helps that his hair is almost jet black now, attracting the sun like a magnifying glass right to his scalp. It’s like instead of lightening in the summer sun the way my hair always does, his goes backward and turns even darker.

  “I’m bored. Let’s go inside and play Mario Kart,” he huffs, dropping the box in defeat. It immediately slips into a pathetic heap of cardboard at his feet, mocking his efforts.

  Eager to get out of the sun, I nod my head quietly and stand up. Eli’s room is upstairs, so the heat follows us inside but it’s easier to breathe with his fan blowing down on us and the slight effects of the air conditioning working overtime making their way up the stairs.

  Our air conditioner went out last week and Denise is still waiting on the repairman to come back and fix it. She seems stressed about money, even despite the hours she’s been picking up at the salon. When he told her how much it would cost, her entire face fell. Right before he left, he told her he’ll take care of it for just the cost of parts, but we’d have to wait until he had a free time slot to stop over. That was a week ago and the heat wave has only gotten worse.

  “Do you think Marnie knows she can come here, too?” he asks, settling onto his bed with a Nintendo remote.

  I walk over to the console and grab my remote, plopping down on the floor beside his bed with my legs crossed. “I don’t know, probably. I don’t think Emma likes playing with you.”

  He looks offended. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeat with a shrug. “I heard her tell Marnie once that she would rather play Barbies than video games. I like playing video games with you, though, so who cares?”