Not Quickly Broken Read online

  Not Quickly Broken

  Book 7

  in the Chop, Chop Series

  by

  L.N. Cronk

  Published by Rivulet Publishing

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition License Note:

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover Photography by Picstodisc.

  Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984

  by International Bible Society.

  Used by permission of Zondervan.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2012 by L.N. Cronk. All rights reserved.

  www.LNCronk.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

  Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

  ~ ~ ~

  IT WAS WHEN Charlotte gave me the finger that I knew for sure she was still mad at me. I had wondered earlier if maybe she was, but now . . .

  Yep. Definitely still mad.

  Ordinarily I wouldn’t have cared one bit what Charlotte White thought of me, but I had to admit that I’d been pretty rude to her a couple of weeks earlier and the civilized thing for me to do now was probably to apologize. (That was one thing at least that the two of us had always been toward one another . . . civilized.)

  As soon as youth group ended I strode across the room and caught up with her before she could get out the door, touching her shoulder to get her attention.

  “Charlotte?”

  She wheeled around and glared at me through narrowed eyes.

  “What?” she snapped, her voice dripping with anger.

  Talk about holding a grudge.

  “I just wanted to apologize,” I said quickly, holding up my hands to show her that I came in peace.

  She surveyed me for a moment as the other kids skirted around us, trying to get out the door. Then she finally stepped back so that we could both move out of the way.

  “Go for it,” she said, lifting her chin at me defiantly.

  I looked at her as she stood there with her arms crossed in front of her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For?”

  “For being a . . .”

  I hesitated, and when I did she immediately jumped in with a suggestion.

  “Jack–”

  “Jerk,” I said quickly, cutting her off. “I’m sorry I was such a jerk.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me and I had the distinct impression that she was trying not to smile.

  “I was just in a really bad mood,” I went on. “I’m not normally like that.”

  “I know what you’re normally like, Jordan Clemmons,” she said. “I’ve known you since you were in diapers.”

  “Well, then you already know how nice I usually am,” I smiled.

  “I know that you stabbed me in the hand with a fork in the third grade.”

  “I did not!”

  “Yes, you did!” she insisted.

  “Were you stealing my lunch?” I asked, skeptically.

  “No,” she said. “I was minding my own business.”

  “Uh-huh. Like when you threw my vocabulary words in the girls’ bathroom?”

  “When did I do that?”

  “Fifth grade,” I said.

  “Too chicken to go in there and get ’em?”

  “Something like that,” I said, suppressing a smile of my own. Then I added, “I got a zero.”

  “You probably deserved it.”

  “Anyway,” I went on, letting myself smile, “I was just having a really bad day and I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” she said after a moment, nodding at me. “Thanks.”

  She started to leave, but then turned back and asked, “You want a ride so that you don’t have to wait for David?”

  David led my youth group (which had combined today for the first time with Charlotte’s youth group to start working on a joint Easter pageant). He lived across the street from me and usually gave me a ride home after he’d made sure all the lights were off at church and the doors were locked and everything.

  “Naw,” I said. “My calculator’s all screwed up and I was going to get him to help me fix it.”

  “What’s the matter with it?” she asked.

  “I dunno,” I shrugged. “It keeps putting an ‘E’ after everything and the decimals aren’t right.”

  “Oh,” she said, knowingly. “It’s in scientific notation.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You want me to try and fix it for you?”

  “I don’t know if you’ll be able to,” I said. “It’s kind of old.”

  “Let me see.”

  We walked across the youth room to the couch where my backpack was. I unzipped it and pulled out the calculator.

  “I don’t have instructions,” I apologized as I handed it to her.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked, staring at it almost reverently as she took it from me.

  “It’s David’s.”

  She stared at it for another moment.

  “Here,” she finally said, reaching into her purse. “Look at mine.”

  Who carries a graphing calculator around in their purse? I almost asked that out loud, but then I remembered who: the girl who’s probably going to be our class valedictorian . . . that’s who. (It was only second semester of our junior year, but I doubted anybody was going to be able to catch her.)

  She handed me her calculator and I looked at it as I took it from her hand . . . it was identical to David’s.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked.

  “David,” she laughed.

  “He had two of ’em?” (Actually I wasn’t too surprised . . . David was kinda weird about calculators.)

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “He bought it because he was going to give it to Greg, but then when Greg died he gave it to me instead.”

  Charlotte’s brother, Greg, and their father, had been killed when Greg was a senior in high school. Charlotte and I had only been in the second grade when it had happened, but I knew that Greg had been David’s best friend.

  “Here,” she said, sitting down on the couch. “I’ll show you how to put it back in normal mode.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, and I sat down next to her.

  “First you go up here and hit the shift key,” she began. “And then you use this arrow to go down to the sixth line–”

  “I’m never going to remember all this,” I interrupted as she punched away at the buttons.

  “You need to become friends with your calculator,” she told me.

  “You sound just like David.”

  She smiled.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “He tutors me in math and he tells me that all the time!”

  “He tutors you in math?”

  “Yeah.”

  She burst out laughing.


  “Well, not everybody sails through math like you do,” I reminded her defensively.

  “That’s not why I’m laughing,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What’s so funny then?”

  “He absolutely loves tutoring you, doesn’t he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she said, still laughing, “sometimes I need help on a problem or something and when he finds out why I’m calling he just acts so . . . so . . .”

  “Gleeful?” I suggested.

  She burst out laughing again and nodded her head. “Yeah. I think it totally makes his day.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, smiling back at her. “He does get pretty excited about math.”

  “When I was little,” she went on, “he used to come over and draw out these math problems on the driveway for me in chalk and make me play this hop-scotch game to solve them.”

  “I can see him doing that,” I nodded.

  We heard footsteps and David walked into the youth room.

  Charlotte clapped her hand over her mouth, trying to keep from laughing more.

  “All we had to do was start talking about math and he magically appeared,” I whispered to Charlotte. Her shoulders started shaking and she closed her eyes.

  “What’s so funny?” David asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to keep a straight face.

  He looked at us suspiciously. “I’m going to go turn off the lights in the fellowship hall and then I’ll be ready to go, okay?” he asked.

  We both nodded. I glanced at Charlotte – she actually had tears in her eyes. David walked back out of the room and we looked at each other and started laughing again.

  “Ohhhh,” Charlotte said, wiping her eyes. “That was too funny.”

  I smiled.

  “You sure you don’t want a ride?” she asked again. “After all, I do owe you one, even if you were a–”

  It had been a few weeks earlier that I had been such a jerk to Charlotte.

  In my defense, I really had been having a bad day. Even my brother, Tanner (who was a coach at the high school), had noticed that something was wrong when I’d walked into the locker room for basketball practice that afternoon.

  “You sick or something?” he asked.

  “I don’t feel too great,” I admitted.

  “You’d better lay off practice for today,” he said. “Go lay down on the couch in my office.”

  Normally I hated missing practice, but I found myself nodding, thankful for a rare moment of concern on Tanner’s part. It was almost as if we were bonding.

  “The last thing I need,” he went on, “is to have you puking all over the court or something.”

  So much for bonding.

  “And put a trash can next to you,” he hollered after me, once I’d turned to go. “I don’t wanna clean up anything in there either!”

  I went and sat down on his couch and then listened to the voicemail from my girlfriend, Rhiannon, for about the tenth time.

  Um, Jordan? I need to talk to you. I, uh . . . just, uh . . . I’ll call you back in a bit.

  I’d never broken up with anybody before, but it didn’t take a lot of experience to know that this wasn’t good. Not good at all.

  I tried to call her (again), but got her voicemail (again), and decided against leaving her pathetic message (again). For the next hour and a half I sat on the couch in my brother’s office and stared at my phone.

  It was beginning to grow dark when Tanner finally stuck his head in the door and tossed me the keys to his truck.

  “Here,” he said as I involuntarily caught them. “Take Charlotte home.”

  “What?”

  “She needs a ride,” he said, pointing behind him to where Charlotte was standing in the doorway. “Take her home and then come back and get me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she needs a ride, Einstein,” he answered, “and I’m not ready to go yet.”

  I couldn’t believe that my day was getting even worse.

  It was no surprise that Charlotte started talking the second we climbed into the cab. Ever since I’d known her it had seemed that Charlotte really enjoyed hearing the sound of her own voice, and today was no exception.

  When did baseball start?

  Had I been getting a lot of letters from colleges?

  Did I have any idea which school I wanted to pick?

  On and on and on.

  You would think that someone as smart as Charlotte supposedly was would have picked up on the fact that I did not want to talk. I wasn’t being rude to her (yet), but I was barely answering any of her questions. I think that after about ten minutes or so, most normal people would have taken the hint.

  “So how come you weren’t practicing?” she went on, completely oblivious. “Are you on academic probation or something?”

  “Have you ever heard of the word uncouth, Charlotte?” I asked, turning to glare at her.

  “Well, I didn’t mean anything by it,” she insisted quickly. “It’s just that you’ve played basketball every single year since junior high school and progress reports came out yesterday, so I figured . . .”

  She shrugged.

  “I’m not on academic probation.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said again. “I just figured that you weren’t sitting around in Tanner’s office for no good reason.”

  “Maybe I have an injury.”

  “Do you have an injury?” she asked.

  “What are you? A reporter for the school newspaper?”

  “I’m just trying to make conversation,” she said.

  “I’m really not in the mood,” I told her.

  “Well, excuse me.” She turned her face to look out the window.

  Suddenly my phone vibrated and I snatched it up.

  New message.

  I opened the phone, praying that it was from Rhiannon.

  It wasn’t. It was from Tanner.

  By dog food on ur way bck.

  “He has got to be kidding,” I muttered.

  “What’s the matter?” Charlotte asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She took a brief pause and then continued.

  “You gone on any college visits yet?”

  “Yep,” I sighed.

  “Where’d you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” she asked. “How can you not know where you went for a college visit?”

  “Look, Charlotte, I–” Suddenly my phone vibrated again. I held it up, read the display, and immediately pulled the truck over to the side of the road.

  “What are you doing?” Charlotte cried as I cut the engine. Ignoring her, I jumped out and slammed the door behind me.

  “Rhiannon?” I said, walking down the side of the road with the truck headlights to my back.

  “Jordan . . .”

  She was already crying.

  “What’s wrong, Rhiannon? Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please don’t do this . . .”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What happened? I thought everything was fine! What did I do wrong?”

  I kept walking down the road.

  “Nothing,” she sobbed. “You didn’t do anything wrong! That’s why this is so hard.”

  “If I didn’t do anything wrong, then why are you doing this?”

  “I just,” she managed. “I just think that maybe we should see other people.”

  I suddenly stopped walking.

  “Is that what this is about?” I asked quietly. “You want to see someone else?”

  She didn’t answer and her silence told me everything I needed to know.

  “You’ve met someone.”

  “Well . . . I mean . . . no. I’ve known him.”

  “You’re going out with him?”

  “No.”

  “But you want to.”

  There was another long pause.

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry,” she finally said.

  I slumped against a telephone pole and covered my eyes with my free hand. How could this be happening? “I thought you loved me . . .”

  “I did!” she cried.

  Did.

  “Then how did this happen?”

  “We never see each other, Jordan,” she said. “How are we supposed to have a relationship with each other when we never even see each other?”

  “We saw each other at Christmas!” I reminded her. “We’re going to see each other at Easter!”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Then we’ll get together more!” I pleaded. “I’ll get a job and buy a car and we’ll see each other every weekend . . .”

  “You can’t get a job!” she said. “Baseball starts in a few weeks!”

  “I’ll quit baseball,” I told her.

  “You’re not going to quit baseball.”

  “Yes, I will!”

  There was a long pause.

  “It’s more than just that,” she said quietly after a moment.

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You don’t feel the same way anymore,” I finally said when she didn’t say anything.

  “You’ll always be special to me,” she said softly. “You were my first love . . .”

  I could barely breathe.

  “Jordan?”

  “What?” I finally managed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I straightened up and looked off into the distance.

  “It’s fine,” I lied, because I knew that’s what she needed to hear. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “It’s okay.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Well, I . . . I’d better go,” she finally said.

  I nodded, but of course she couldn’t see me, so I said, “Okay.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, still nodding. “You too.”

  Then she hung up.

  I stood in the growing darkness, gripping my phone for a long time. Finally I turned around and looked back at the truck, surprised to see how far I had walked. I put my phone in my pocket and headed back, wiping my eyes on my sleeve and hoping it was too dark for Charlotte to see my face. When I reached the truck, I climbed in and didn’t say a word.