Page 1 of Reckless With You

Chapter 1

Amelia

I’mgood at making mistakes. After all, I’ve had twenty-six years’ worth of learning how to make them in spectacular fashion. I’d like to say I’m good at making them with grace and dignity, but that just isn’t the case.

I make mistakes. I make them often.

And, sometimes, I realize those mistakes were made for a reason. So I can learn and grow from them.

In retrospect, I can look back on them and figure out exactly what I did wrong. I can figure out what I need to do now and how I can be a better person because of it.

I can become a better Amelia. A better Carr.

But as I’m making the mistake?

Sometimes, it feels like the world is crashing down around me, and I just want to fall into a hole, bury myself, and never come out.

Sometimes, those mistakes are difficult to figure out, to realize that I’m actually making them, so I make things worse by compounding them with even more mistakes.

But I’m human.

So human that I know we all make bad choices. We think we’re doing the right thing, and then suddenly realize that we’re not. We screw up to the point where everything is bad, and all we want to do is die. Hide away from the world and forget that those mistakes ever happened.

Sometimes—especially when I was younger—I didn’t want to look at those wrong choices I made. I wanted to forget them. Move past them.

Like that time I was in school, and the teacher split up the class into rows facing each other. Three rows on the left side of the room, and three on the right.

That meant I literally faced some of my classmates. On A days, the ones where I actually had that class, I couldn’t wear a skirt because that meant facing the rest of the class and...

Everybody could see up your skirt.

I had no idea why our Portuguese teacher decided to set up the room that way. Maybe because she wanted to be able to walk through the classroom as she focused on what we were doing, listening to us annunciating the words horribly.

But it wasn’t like I could change any of it. So, I just didn’t wear skirts. Because people who had that class before me had warned me. Like they warned me not to wear a dress on days where we had geography with Mr. Clampton. He liked to put the girls in skirts up front. He was never super creepy about it, never touched, or really even looked. But it wasn’t a coincidence that the girls always sat up front.

Mr. Clampton no longer worked at the school, thank God.

Because it wasn’t like you actually told your parents that things were creepy. You just relayed to the next generation how things were. And it wasn’t until you realized…oh my God, that’s actually horrible!...that you took things to the next level and got him out of the school.

But I digress. There was that one time in Portuguese class that I made a mistake. So bad that I was determined not to think about it again. I figured I’d bury it down deep in my subconscious and maybe deal with it later. When I was an adult. You know, after therapy. Because everybody on TV had therapy. So, I mean, I figured I would just deal with it then. I wasn’t going to deal with it when I was a fourteen-year-old girl.

Because there was this kid named Lee. Lee was about my height—so a little short for a boy—but I hadn’t minded. He was sweet, kind of funny, a little mean, but I didn’t mind. Because, sometimes, he paid attention to me. And I was one of those girls.

The ones I hated.

I wanted someone to notice me. So this skinny boy named Lee did this thing with his chair where he would make a circle with his body. He would lean against his legs under the chair and fold himself into a pretzel, then do circles around the desk itself.

He did it over and over, and when the teacher wasn’t looking, everyone would try it.

The slender girls would do it, and everyone would laugh. Some of the guys would do it.

Though some of the more muscular guys just scoffed and said, “Hell, no.”

I wanted to be one of the cool people. So, I tried.

Notice, I saidtried.

I tried and got stuck.