Welcome to Trainwrecks, a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.
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Content Warnings: Mentions of CSA, physical abuse, and extremely problematic behavior
Halfway through my sixth-grade year, after bombing another test, recognition came at last:
“Damn, Jasmine, you dumb as hell!”
Her name was Latrisha Oak, a girl who I knew only from rumors, and she’d been sitting next to me all year, watching my academic decline with something like glee. With her short hair, makeup, large hoop earrings, low-rise jeans, and combat boots, she was everything I aspired to be at the time, and she was leaning towards me with her chin propped in her hand and a smirk on her face. “How you come to class every day and learn nothing?” she asked.
Some of the other kids nearby snickered. I could have been embarrassed, drawn into myself and blushed and stammered out an excuse. But this was my chance. If I couldn’t be in with the other girls, maybe I could be in with Latrisha Oak’s crew. I leaned back and affected the most bored expression I could muster. “I got other shit to do,” I said. It was probably the first time anyone had heard me swear.
Latrisha was not convinced. “Like what?”
“Come over to my house sometime and I’ll show you.”
I’d learned from television that most people couldn’t resist a mystery, and this was no exception. Latrisha did end up coming over that very afternoon, and I took the opportunity to turn myself from pathetic latchkey kid to the cool girl who had time on her hands, a pantry full of snacks, and no adults breathing down her neck.
Latrisha and I became inseparable. She brought me into her friend group, a diverse mix of kids united by an abundance of issues at home. From divorced parents to poverty to drugs, everyone had a sob story.
Everyone but me.
If I wasn’t so desperate for acceptance, I might have felt self-conscious about it. There I was, parading myself around as a problem child when my loving, dual-income parents came home every evening and fed me, asked about my day, cared enough to help me with my homework no matter how tired they were. While my friends came to school with bruises on their bodies, stories about the fights their parents had, or about the cops showing up at their neighbor’s house for the millionth time, I swallowed my stories of shopping trips, movie nights, bowling, and weekend getaways. It was pathetic, but in those days, I thought myself a queen.
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