Read My Beating Teenage Heart for Free Online

watching, turn down the audio and video and retreat into the darkness, but it’s so lonely on my own that I don’t like to shut him out for very long. At least Breckon has the pills to make him rest. My mind never stops. I have two choices—I can watch his every move or wrestle with my memory in complete solitude, but either way there’s no such thing as sleep.
    Maybe that’s because technically I’m already unconscious .
    I’ll go stark raving mental in here with only my own thoughts or images from someone else’s train wreck of a life to keep me company. How will I stand it?
    Breckon’s girlfriend is leaning over him in bed. She watches him adjust his head on the pillow and swing his arm over his eyes—an unconscious reflex reaction to block the sun’s rays—but it appears that she doesn’t want to wake him. She lies back next to him until the alarm clock reads 8:42, at which point she throws her legs over the side of the bed and reaches for her jeans.
    When she turns to face him again, jeans on, Breckon peers up at her with sleepy eyes. I zoom in on them in an extreme close-up and am glad to spy the telltale crusty residue underneath his lashes that proves he’s been asleep and not faking.
    I marvel at the cleverness of my brain to create such an intricate plotline. Breckon. His parents and extended family, complete with a cigarette-smoking grandfather, grieving Pomeranian and deceased little sister.
    If my mind has the energy for that why can’t it bring me back?
    So many questions and no means to locate the answers.
    “Hey,” Breckon’s girlfriend says quietly as she works her hair free from its ponytail, brushes it with her fingers and then reknots it in place. “I didn’t want to wake you but I’m late for school.
    “I don’t have to go,” she adds, bending her leg to rest one of her knees on the bed.
    “No, you should go.” Breckon clears his throat, Ks h.
    I wonder if they might be, if they thought it would help him.
    His girlfriend pauses in place, her Mary Janes still on the floor next to the bed. “Well … what are you going to do today? You should do something.” She sits down on the bed and curls her arm around his waist. “I mean, maybe being busy will—”
    Breckon scrunches up his forehead, his eyebrows leaping together. “Being busy won’t do shit. Nothing changes the facts.”
    Breckon’s girlfriend winces at the bitterness in his face and tone and I know her suggestion wasn’t meant to be callous, just the opposite, but that she can’t think how to get that across without risking saying something else he’ll take the wrong way.
    “What?” Breckon challenges, squaring his jaw.
    “Nothing.” She moves her hand away from his waist to caress his face. “I just want to be here for you.”
    Breckon blinks heavily. “I know. But I’m not even here now. You know that, don’t you?”
    Breckon’s girlfriend nods and reaches for his hand. Their fingers automatically entwine. She bends towards their interlocked hands and presses her mouth to his skin, changing his demeanor entirely.
    “Thanks for bringing me the pills last night and everything,” he tells her. “But it’s okay. You can go to school, Jules.”
    Jules , so that’s her name. It’s possible Breckon mentioned it before when I wasn’t really listening. Now that I know she’s a Jules instead of an Emily or Megan, I can’t picture her being anything else.
    Jules studies Breckon, trying to determine whether it’s really okay to leave him.
    “I’ll talk to you later,” Breckon continues, hauling himself out of bed and into yesterday’s wrinkled pants and shirt.
    “You sure?” Jules asks.
    He nods and messes with his hair. “I might even go back to bed for a while.”
    Jules pulls back the straps on her Mary Janes and jams her feet into her shoes. One of her fingers brushes against her bottom lip. “I’m glad the pills worked.” A stiff smile stretches onto her face. “I’ll check messages at