Distinction: The Distraction Trilogy #3 (31 page)

“Daddy!” The room erupts with laughter when a blur of red hair and white satin fabric comes racing down the aisle.

“Adriana,” my dad clucks as she wraps herself around my legs. He tries to pry her off but it’s not use.

“I missed you!” She grins as I scoop her into my arms and hold her tight.

“You look stunning,” I say softly in her ear. “But you were supposed to walk down the aisle slowly and throw your pretty petals in the air.”

She looks around the large room and blushes when she sees that all eyes are on her. “Oh.”

I flick her pouting lower lip with my thumb and kiss her forehead. “Go back down there, pick up your flower basket and start again.”

“But I missed you.”

“And I missed you.” I hold her tight to me again before placing her back on the floor. “But mummy is ready to get married now.”

She skips back down the aisle, her little five year old legs carrying her to the other end quickly. “Hi auntie Hayley!” She waves through the doors to the right and I know that Elle is about to step through those doors any moment now.

“Adriana!” My dad laughs, clicking his fingers at his granddaughter before standing behind her in order to keep her in check, something that none of us can ever do. She’s wild, from the roots of her shocking red hair to the green nail polish on her little toes.

“You mustn’t stand on the flowers, grandpa!” She chastises, pointing her chubby forefinger at my dad. He loves it; he loves her. He’s the one who taught her the point in the first place.

The soft harp begins to play once more and Adriana finally starts to walk at the correct speed down the aisle, throwing daisy petals into the air as she goes. They flutter around her and her eyes watch them with childlike wonder. She looks so much like her mother.

I’m screwed. Totally fucking screwed when she becomes old enough to start liking boys.

That is why we gave her a brother only one year after bringing her into the world. That and I didn’t want her growing up an only child. Having nobody to play with is the worst thing for a child. I’m still surprised that Eloise went along with it.

I look down at my son, Jonathan, who is playing on my phone, mostly to keep him in place by my side. Both of my kids are naughty little buggers that I have no control over. Eloise surprisingly loves it. She loves their mischief, their pranks and their antics nearly as much as I do.

“I did it!” Adriana cries when she reaches me and, sure enough, she did.

“That is the most beautiful trail of flowers I have ever seen.” I hear my dad say quietly, but my eyes remain on the aisle as Hayley, looking beautiful in mint green with a swollen belly lifting the soft fabric, walks towards me. She winks at Tyler who is my best man, standing to the left of Jonathan. It seemed only fitting that, once we established a man code, we became fast friends. He’s a great guy and he keeps me company when Hayley and Eloise are getting up to no good while dragging us along behind them. Which is often, especially now that their three year old daughter and our four year old son are inseparable.

Speaking of their three year old daughter… I lean toward Tyler. “Where’s Charlie?” We call her Charlie though her actual name is Charla, like Charlotte but without the T sound at the end.

He looks at Hayley who stands on the opposite side of the aisle. They mouth a silent conversation to each other.

“Apparently she’s somewhere in here.”

Their daughter is quiet, too quiet, but she’s pure mischief. She’s excellent at hiding. It scares me to death but Tyler and Hayley seem to have it handled.

“There she is.” Tyler points under the chairs and sure enough, a golden haired girl comes crawling from beneath Eloise’s mum’s chair. I have to grab Jonathan by the back of his suit to stop him from chasing after her when he sees her.

Bloody hell.

Finally the harp turns to the soft sound of a piano. The tune of ‘Nothing else matters’ is played softly and slowly as my bride to be finally comes into view.

She takes my breath away.

I stare into his eyes, seeking the strength I need to get to the end of the aisle without falling or fainting. I knew we should have eloped but I promised my mum and Hayley a proper service and a party.

He smiles softly at me and his eyes trail up and down my body which is being hugged by a tight, ivory gown made from beautiful silks and other fabrics that feel so stiff I can hardly breathe. It hugs my legs to my knees before fanning out to form a beautiful train. I’m lucky I can walk at all.

I’m thankful for my dad’s support. He keeps my hand tucked in his arm and his other hand over mine as we walk in time to the slow tune. It was after the birth of Adriana that I forgave him for all he’d done, and only because Isaac forgave him. Now we’re all as close as can be, not including when my parents and John argue over who has the kids when. We’re rarely in need of childcare.

A blur of red hair shoots by me as I lose myself in the eyes of the man I love, followed by a blur of gold hair, followed by a blur of white blond hair belonging to Jonathan. John cried when we said we were naming our son after him.

Nobody cares that the kids are running wild. They seem entertained by it all, which is good because this next part is the most boring for everybody else. Not for us though. I’ve been waiting for this moment for far too long.

I make it to my husband and want to kiss his perfect lips and mess up his perfect hair with my hands. He’s so handsome, especially in a black three-piece suit.

Sensing my dark thoughts, he circles his thumb on the inside of my wrist as the officiant begins to speak.

I lose myself in his eyes again as I try to share my thoughts with him, my memories and happiness. The past five years haven’t been easy and they haven’t been without error. We haven’t been happy in love like love-sick little kids for the entire time. There have been times where I’ve threatened to leave and I’ve wanted to punch him in the nose, just as there have been times where he has no doubt felt the same. But we’ve persevered and we’ve been good to each other. We’ll continue persevering and being good to each other because we love each other deeply.

I don’t want anyone else. I can’t imagine being with anyone else.

He’s my everything.

My kids are my everything.

This room is full of people who mean something to us.

Life is good.

No… life is great.

“Elle…” Isaac squeezes my hand and Hayley starts sniggering behind me.

“Huh?” I blink away my thoughts and my eyes widen with horror. “Oh… yes. I do.”

Isaac rolls his eyes heavenward as the room erupts with laughter. “You’re supposed to be saying your vows.”

“I knew that.” My cheeks flame with embarrassment and I quickly repeat after the officiant as my kids and Hayley’s kid run screaming around our legs. Finally, after what seems like a lifetime of waiting, I get to say ‘I do’ and kiss my husband. In the church, in the centre of town, in front of everyone.

The Distraction Trilogy

Distraction

Destruction

The Little Bits Series

A Little Bit of Crazy

A Little Bit of Us

A Little Bit of Trouble

A Little Bit of Truth 

The Broken Series

Broken

Connected

I'm now 25 and I’ve been writing since I could hold a pen in my hand! I love to write, it’s my passion, and I never stop.  In fact I love to write so much I have started over one hundred and fifty different books before finally completing my first ever novel 'A Little Bit of Crazy' which I published in May 2013 on Amazon for Kindle. I was grateful when I received feedback as it helps me be a better writer. 

When I'm not writing, I love spending time with my family and when I get some spare time (not easy with young children!) it’s either reading or listening to music. You won’t find me without a book or my Kindle in my hand. I read whilst I’m cooking, cleaning, talking, walking… you could say reading is my other passion! 

Thank you for taking the time to read my book. I appreciate any kind of feedback be it good or bad. This has been a huge learning curve for me and I'm happy to receive any advice/criticism...praise? That you wish to provide. Don’t be shy.  Thank you,

Love Alex

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@A_E_Murphy

2005

I looked at my watch and sighed. I kept walking. Why did I have to tell mom and dad that I was going to hang out with friends after school today? Now I had at least another half hour to kill before I could go home. If I went home now, I’d just have a ton of questions to answer. “Why are you home so early?” “Did you have a bad time?”

If I could just hold out another forty five minutes I could answer the ‘did you have a good time, sweetie?’ question with a quick ‘yeah’, and run up the stairs to my room. Why did I think this city was going to be any different?

We had moved every few years because of my dad’s job. I should have known by now that the bullshit they always told me about getting to start over and how exciting it is was just that. Bullshit.

They wanted me to make friends. They wanted me to be happy. I wanted to make friends and to be happy, too. It just wasn’t easy for me. Some people were able to walk into a room and they were instantly BFFs with about ten people. Me, I had to take time to get to know people and build a friendship. I just wasn’t the type of person that people flocked to. Plus, when you moved all the time, you had to deal with being ‘the new kid’ all the time. Being the new kid was the same as being a social pariah. And if you had to start a new school, new city in the middle of the school year? Forget about it. And somehow, every time, the new classmates knew that I wasn’t ‘popular’ material. I swear, word must have been sent ahead. So if I told mom and dad that I was hanging out with friends, they were happy and they would leave me alone.

I turned the corner and saw an older woman in her front yard, beating the crap out of a rug. I couldn’t tell her age from looking at her, but she seemed to be somewhere between seventy and one hundred. However, she must have been a body builder because the way she was beating the rug, I was surprised it hadn’t unraveled. Mental note – don’t piss her off.

“Hey, why are you beating that thing?” I leaned over her fence, rocking back and forth on to the balls of my feet.

She turned and looked at me in surprise. Wow, if central casting was looking for the picture perfect Italian grandmother for their movies, I found her. She was wearing a housecoat and an apron. She was rocking some crazy slide on shoes, and it looked like she was also wearing support hose. I tried not to stare. It was so freaking hard not to stare.

“To clean it.” Well, that was a surprise. Instead of a voice heavily accented with the flavor of the old country you would expect, she sounded like pure Providence. If you took Long Island, NY and Boston, MA accents, put them in a blender and mixed them up good, you’d have the Providence accent. We’d only been here a few months but so far I’ve found it to be my favorite accent so far. Well, that and Dallas, Texas.

“Dontcha have a vacuum cleaner?”

“This is how my mother, my grandmother and her grandmother before cleaned their rugs. If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.” With that she wound up and delivered a beating that makes me cringe out of sympathy for the poor rug. I mean, seriously, what did it ever do to her?

I was lost in my thoughts about the poor rug’s punishment, and didn’t notice that the rhythmic ‘thump, thump, thump’ had stopped. I looked up and saw her looking at me as if I was supposed to be doing something. Holy self-conscious moment.

“What?”

“Well, are you going to come over and give it a whack, or not?”

“Why on earth would I want to do that?” What the hell, this old broad wanted me to do her chores for her? Not happening.

She started walking towards me, squinting her eyes as she gives me a slow once-over. She didn’t say a word, and I found myself taking an involuntary step back, uncomfortable under the assessment that I was obviously getting. She gave me a quick nod.

“You’re upset about something. You’ve been pacing by my house for the last hour, and some of the times you’ve been in an animated conversation with yourself.” I cringed at that one. It wasn’t the first time someone had caught me having a conversation with myself. I mean, a full conversation. Questions and answers. People have always said it’s not crazy to talk to yourself, it’s only crazy if you answer yourself. Well, apparently I was hella crazy.

“So, if you are upset, and want to get some aggression out, come take a whack at the rug. It’s how I deal with the memory of my dearly deceased husband, may the good Lord bless his rotten soul.”

I knew what my face must have looked like. I mean, I started following her and then almost tripped when she said that.

“Oh, don’t just stand there catching flies, get to work.” With that she handed me the wooden handled rug beater and I took a couple weak swings at it.

“Really? That’s the best you’ve got? Put some power in those swings, girlie.” She grabbed the wooden handle and laid a whooping on that rug. She even added sound effects as she landed each hit. Dust flew everywhere, in the air, in my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I was coughing up my lungs and she stood there laughing at me. Great, even a thousand year old woman made fun of me. I turned to leave. I put up with this at school, there was no way in hell I was sticking around to be this chick’s amusement for the afternoon.

“Wait, wait, I’m sorry I laughed. You just reminded me of myself when I got my first cigarette at age ten. I was coughing up all sorts of fun stuff. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I stopped. I didn’t know if I wanted to go back or not. I stood there for a few seconds, weighing out my options. I could either go back to walking around the neighborhood, begging time to go by faster so that I don’t have to let my parents down; or I could stand here beating a rug with an eccentric old lady.

I sighed. I reached for the rug beater, returned to the rug and laid into it. Every hurt, every lonely day, every lunchtime spent alone, every snickering comment laced with “Icky Vicki” was getting beaten out of that rug. I felt silly, especially when I realized that I had tears running down my cheeks. I was suddenly exhausted from the exertion and my hand lowered slowly to my side.

I turned away from the rug, afraid that she was going to make fun of me some more for crying. Or laugh at how hard I beat the rug, or how ridiculous I looked doing it. But she was gone. During my big emotional rug beating experience, she bailed. Great. I had the ability to drive away even

the psycho elderly. I laid the rug beater on the ground and started to walk towards the gate.

I heard a noise and turned towards the house to see her struggling with the door and two glasses of water. What? She wasn’t weirded out by me? She held one of the glasses out to me.

“Thanks.” I mumble, probably not sounding too convincing, but I was confused by this person. She seemed rough and a little scary, but she was being really nice to me.

“Why are you being nice to me? You don’t know me.” I realized that I had just said that out loud. I hated when there was no filter between my brain and my mouth.

She let out a sharp bark of laughter at the look of embarrassment on my face.

“What’s your name?”

“Why do you want to know?” I was always a little suspicious. You learned that in a life when you moved around a lot. Don’t trust anyone.

“Well, you’re telling me that I don’t know you, and therefore I apparently shouldn’t be ‘nice’ to you. So if you tell me your name, I’ll know you, and I’ll have your permission to be kind.” Her eyes sparkled as she says this to me.

Her reasoning made sense to me.

“Vicki. My name is Vicki.”

She tilted her head as she looked at me. Again, that weird assessment thing. I felt uncomfortable but at the same time impressed. I had to learn how to do this. It seemed like a pretty cool skill, kind of like a mental x-ray of the person. One quick scan and you figured out all their inner thoughts and their demons. That could be really helpful in high school.

“What’s your
real
name, child?”

I cocked an eyebrow and looked at her. This had to be the weirdest day that I’d ever had. She’d asked for my name. I told her my name. This should have been the point in the conversation where she told me
her
name; not questioned me further on mine.

“I don’t understand.”

“What is your
real
name? The one your parents gave you at birth. When you said your name was ‘Vicki’, you didn’t sound like you were too happy about it. So, what is your name?”

I wondered if this woman was a witch. Like, a Hansel and Gretel witch. Or maybe a mental hospital escapee. That was much more interesting, I thought. I smiled, my parents would just
love
to find out that my first friend in this place was a million year old mental patient who may or may not have been a witch that liked to eat small children.

“My name is Victoria Alexandra Edwards.” Yeah. That was my name. I always thought it sounded like my mom was trying to turn me into a royal with a name that sounded like it should have a Roman numeral after it. You know, Victoria Alexandra Edwards III or something like that.

As I looked at my neighbor, whose name I still didn’t know, I realized she was giving me the same odd look everyone else gave when they heard my full name. I got it, seriously, I did. I didn’t match my name one bit. It was a very flowery, fluffy name, and I was not someone who could ever be accused of being remotely flowery or fluffy.

My mom was an only girl with five older brothers. Somehow, with all that testosterone surrounding her, she had managed to come out very girly. She had always prayed for a little girl, so that she could have someone to be girly with. I was an only child. From what I’ve been told, my mom sobbed with joy when the ultrasound showed nothing was hanging out between my legs. Starting that very same day she started buying every pink, purple and frilly baby thing she could get her hands on. My dad was just wanting a healthy baby, so he didn’t really care one way or another whether I was a boy or a girl. I could only begin to imagine what his reaction was as the little room that they had designated as a nursery started to overflow with frilly and frothy concoctions.

I’d read somewhere that sometimes those ultrasounds can be wrong. I liked to amuse myself sometimes with imagining my mom’s reaction if I’d been born a boy, even after she’d been told I was a girl. I have a strong feeling mom would have ordered hormone therapy and a sex change right then and there.

Unfortunately for mom, she got a girl who’s not very girly. I really don’t care to wear pink or purple at all. Ever. I have a feeling she gave me an aversion to it by the fact that it was
all
I wore until I had the ability to choose my own clothing. And by ability, I mean, when I was allowed to. It’s not like I wished I was a boy or anything, it’s just that I wasn’t very feminine. Someone once told me I should have been born a boy. Who knows, maybe I had been originally a boy in the womb but mom prayed my ‘willie’ off.

I wasn’t cute, I wasn’t shapely or anything. I had a hell of a growth spurt last summer and now I towered over everyone in my class except for a handful of the boys. I had always tended to be closer to the chunky side of the scale, and really didn’t care to involve myself in sports. I wasn’t someone who purposefully put herself in a group of peers. It usually didn’t end well for me.

“That’s quite a name. What made you choose to go by the name ‘Vicki’?”

“Who said I got to choose? No one gets to choose what they are called.” I was thinking of that horrid nickname. “Icky Vicki”. I heard it a lot. Braces and acne have not helped my popularity contest.

“You have more choices in your life than you will ever understand.”

What the hell did she mean by that? I was sixteen years old. I had no choices in my life. I didn’t get to choose where I live. I didn’t get to choose how long we stayed

“Maybe once I’m older I will get to choose stuff, but for now, I have to go with what is chosen for me. When I was little, they called me Vicki. So, I’m Vicki.”

“Who would you like to be?”

Seriously, my head was starting to hurt with this woman’s crazy questions.

“Don’t you mean ‘what would I like to be’? Like when I grow up?”

More laughter from my new…friend?

“I wouldn’t be so stupid as to ask you what you wanted to be when you grow up. I think it’s stupid that
children
are told to make a decision on what they want to do for the remaining sixty or more years of their lives, when they haven’t even figured out how to live their lives. I want to know
who
you want to be.”

I shook my head, wide-eyed at this woman.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, that’s a start.” She picked up our empty glasses and stood up, slowly to return to her house. It looked like she was saying good bye.

“Wait. I don’t know
your
name.”

She smiled slowly, and for some weird reason I felt like I’d passed some psycho test of hers.

“You can call me Nonna.”

Chapter 2

Nonna?

What the hell type of name was Nonna? She was giving me shit about going by the name ‘Vicki’ and she called herself ‘Nonna’?

Crazy old lady.

I looked at my watch again and smiled. I had managed to soak up over an hour and a half with ‘Nonna’. Well, at least it wasn’t a total waste.