Keeper of my Heart

‘He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious? She did ballet-’

“It’s 6 a.m., you better have a good reason for calling me so early,” Noel Ashford grumbles from beneath her duvet, hand barely slipping out to grab hold of her phone. She heaves a heavy sigh when she sees her best friend, Priscilla Wright’s name flash across the screen.

“Do you have any idea what time it is right now? Have you no self-awareness?”

The deadpan tone of her friend crackles through the other end. “Do you know what time it is? I’ve been standing outside your house for the last 20 minutes; school starts in 10 minutes.”

Shooting out of bed, she pulls her phone away from her ear to check, realizing she had checked her phone upside down when looking at the time.

It isn’t 6 a.m., it’s 9 o’clock.

“School starts in 10 minutes,” Priscilla’s singsong muffled voice bursts through the phone as Noel tosses her on speaker, rushing around the room to gather clothes that smell clean.

“Did your dad not come home again last night?” she hears her friend ask.

Hopping around the room as she attempts to put her sock on, she yells back across the room. “It’s been about 3 days in a row now, I have no idea where he goes or what he does, he just calls me every night to tell me he is working later and not to wait up.”

She hears Priscilla snort.

“Must be nice to have parents who aren’t ever around but at least remember you’re still alive.”

Priscilla is the only daughter of Mayor Austin Wright and his catalog copy wife, Stephanie. Due to this, she never sees her father other than when the family is needed to pose for cameras or help open a new establishment. Despite her father never being there and her mother caring less about her, Priscilla still has a strict set of rules she needs to live by, to uphold her family name and image in town.

Living in such a small town as Bisbee, Arizona, word tends to travel fast amongst the residents and for someone like Mayor Wright, having the public on his side positively is a must to keep his position as long as possible.

It’s not like anyone else is rushing to be Mayor of this dingy town.

“Are you almost done? I don’t want to have to pick a seat in front of the class. I have Mrs. Jones for the first period, and she spits a lot when she talks, I better not have to take a saliva shower today because of you, Nole!”

Noel cringes at the corny nickname her friend gave her the first day of freshman year, misreading her name on her nametag thanks to her dyslexia.

“Nole just sounds better, you have copper hair and hole yourself up inside like a mole, so it isn’t far off from your true nature.”

She doesn’t know what compelled her back then to become friends with a girl who had just compared her to a mole, simply because she prefers a night in with snacks and Netflix, rather than a night out with bad food and partying. You can get her to go almost anywhere with the temptation of food, but it better be damn good.

There are also no clubs in Bisbee, having to go to the next city over just to have the same amount of fun, if not more, that she can have at home.

“Okay, I’m ready! I’m coming down now,” Noel says and grabs her phone to hang up, but sees that Priscilla already ended the phone call 5 minutes ago.

She makes it outside to where Priscilla is leaning against her cherry red Subaru, a guilt-gift given to her by her dad for her 16th birthday last year because he couldn’t make it, like most of her birthdays she has said.

“Finally,” she calls out, but points a finger at her watch and then at Noel. “But we are now late, and there is a 99% chance now that I will have to pick a seat at the front of the class, which means you owe me to lunch today, and I get to pick whatever I want from the cafeteria.”

Noel just chuckles at her friend and agrees to whatever she demands.

“So, here we are, the last year of this 12-year sentence,” Priscilla says, running a hand through her sleek blonde hair as it whips through the car’s open window. “This is the last year to be a teenager, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean? We’re barely 18, still got 2 more years to go before you can call yourself an adult, and even then, I doubt we’ll be much different than now.”

Priscilla shakes her head. “Everything is going to start to change. High school ends, and everyone goes their separate ways, we’ll no longer have the connection of arriving at the same place every morning, walking the same path every day.”

She turns and gives a pointed look to Noel.

“This is why I hope you try to get out more this year and experience life a little more. Actually, how about this, you make a goal right now to do one thing this year that you have wanted to do for a while, but just haven’t found the courage or motivation to do. There has to be something,” Priscilla says.

Noel doesn’t have to think that hard about it, she knows there is one experience she has missed out on purposely, because of both lack of courage and motivation, but knows she will regret it if she doesn’t experience it this year before she goes off to college.

Experience falling in love, at least once.

She has read enough books and watched enough drama shows to know how most high school relationships go, most if not all of them ending before the couple even graduates. Her mother once said to her that falling in love when you’re a kid and when you’re an adult are two completely different feelings of love.

Noel’s parents are considered high school sweethearts when her mother was alive, having met and started dating in their last year of high school, attending the same college together, until her dad changed career paths afterward, and got married when they discovered her mother was pregnant with little Noel. Her mother still stood by what she said, explaining that she fell in love with her father when they were kids, and fell in love with him over again when they got older, this time falling in love with the older, mature version of him.