Summer's End (Wildflowers #5) - Jill Sanders Page 0,2
said with a slight frown. Aubrey knew that she was running her eyes over her. For the past three years, it seemed that all anyone had done was look at her with calculation in their eyes.
She was in one of the outfits that had been picked out for her. It was uncomfortable to begin with, but Miss Ellison had starched it until it was so stiff, she felt like she was wearing a straitjacket instead of a sundress.
Then a blond girl stepped forward and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Aubrey answered as she looked down at her feet while her eyes burned even more. She would not cry in front of these girls. They’d probably burst out laughing and make fun of her.
“I’m Elle. This is Hannah, Zoey, and Scarlett.” The blond girl motioned to each of them as she talked.
“Aubrey,” she answered quickly as her eyes returned to her tennis shoes. She was at least thankful that Miss Ellison hadn’t been in the car ride from the airport, where she’d slipped out of the stupid sandals that she’d forced her to wear.
Her eyes were so blurry from the tears that she didn’t get a good look at any of them. Not really.
“We were going to bunk together,” Elle said softly. “Would you like to join us? There’s room for one more.”
Aubrey’s head jerked up, and she took a second to search each of their eyes. It only took a moment for her to realize that they weren’t being mean or making fun of her. Instead, what she found in each of them was just as much sadness and loneliness as she felt herself. “Sure.” She nodded quickly and fell in step with them. “Thank you.”
Over that first summer, the five friends, known as the Wildflowers, grew inseparable. To be honest, she doubted she would have made it through the first day without any of them, let alone that whole first summer.
For the next five years, even when the friends were separated by distance, they were her line of defense against her father and all the horrors of the life he forced on her.
She was shipped out in the winters to a boarding school in upper New York where she attended classes on everything from ballet to baking and was molded into a perfect socialite. Still, her father’s reach was long, and she didn’t have many freedoms even there. The only place she felt like she could breathe was during her time at River Camps with her Wildflowers.
However, during her high school years, without her father’s knowledge, she’d managed to enroll in a couple of off-campus classes. Taking tai chi and judo was the only thing she had ever done in direct defiance of his wishes.
Both classes were a great place to channel her pent-up anger, and she excelled in each area. She easily gained her black belts long before graduation.
When she wasn’t attending classes, she trained herself in other ways. She would walk the hallways of her home or school at night, in the dark, to strengthen her ability to escape any situation. This helped her feel less trapped in life.
The classes and the summers spent at the camp got her through some of the darkest years of her life. When the five friends had grown too old to attend camp themselves, they’d returned as counselors. She’d lied to her father about the summer job and instead told him that the camp now allowed older girls. She would find out years later that Elle’s grandfather Joe had convinced him of that story at Elle’s request.
Shortly after their last summer at River Camps and a week after she’d graduated school, the Wildflowers took a trip together. Since then, they’d tried to get together every summer and head somewhere tropical for a week or at least a weekend. Their last trip had been to Cabo, last year.
She’d been working for one of her father’s businesses, the third one to date. She’d flown through jobs at Harold Smith’s many ventures more than most people changed hairstyles.
She tried to fit in anywhere, but the fact was, she just didn’t.
Over the years, she’d tried everything to grow closer to her father. Even Miss Ellison had disappeared a few months after Aubrey’s sixteenth birthday.
At first, Aubrey had tried to look for the woman, believing she’d been fired by her father. Then she’d overheard several of the staff talking about how Pricilla Ellison had retired and moved to Italy to be closer to her ailing sister.