Breaking Nova Read Online Free PDF Page A

rocking on the bathroom floor, counting the cracks in the tile and trying to get myself to calm down and stop feeling guilty for kissing someone else, because Landon was gone and he took a part of me with him—at least that was what it feels like. What’s left of me is a hollow shell full of denial and tangled with confusion. I have no idea who I am anymore. I really don’t. And I’m not sure if I want to know or not.
    “Oh come on, Nova.” She releases my hand and claps her hands in front of her. “Please, can we just go and try to have some fun?”
    I sigh, defeated, and nod, knowing that the true feelings of why I don’t want to go over there lie more in the fact that I hate new places than anything else. Unfamiliar situations put me on edge, because I hate the unknown. It reminds me just how much the unknown controls everything, and my counting can sometimes get a little out of hand. But I don’t want to argue anymore with Delilah, either, because then my anxiety will get me worked up and the counting will, too. Either way, I know I’m going to have a head full of numbers. At least if I go with Delilah, then I can keep an eye on her and maybe she’ll end up happy. And really, that’s all I can ask for. For everyone to be happy. But as I all too painfully know, you can’t force someone to be happy, no matter how much you wish you could.

Chapter 2
Quinton
    I ask myself the same question every day:
Why me? Why did I survive?
And every day I get the same response:
I don’t know.
Deep down, I know there really isn’t an answer, yet I keep asking the same question, hoping that maybe one day someone will give me a hand and give me a clear answer. But my head is always foggy, and answers always come to me in harsh, jagged responses: regardless of why I survived, it was my fault, and I should be the one buried under the ground, locked in a box, below a marked stone. Two people died because of me that day. Two people I cared about. And even though the guy I barely know miraculously lived, he could have very easily died, and his death would have been my fault, too.
    All my fault.
    “Thanks for letting me stay here, man,” I say for the thousandth time. I can tell my cousin Tristan is getting a little irritated by how many times I’ve said it, but I can’t seem to stop. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him to help out the most hated member of our family. The one who destroyed lives and split apart a family. But I needed to leave, despite how much I didn’t want to; something that became clear when my dad finally spoke to me after over a year of near silence.
    “I think it’s time for you to move out,” he’d said, eyeing my lazy ass sprawled out on the bed as music played in the background. I was sketching something that looked like an owl in a tree, but my vision was a little blurred, so I couldn’t quite tell for sure. “You’re nineteen years old and getting too old to live at home.”
    I was high out of my mind, and I had a hard time focusing on anything except how slow his lips were moving. “Okay.”
    He studied me from the doorway and I could tell he was disappointed in what he saw. I was no longer his son, but a washed-up druggie who lay around all day wasting his life, ruining everything he’d worked so hard to achieve. All that time spent in high school, getting good grades, winning art fairs, working hard to get scholarships, was exchanged for a new goal: getting high. He didn’t try to understand why I needed drugs—that without them, I’d be worse off—and I never wanted him to. It wasn’t like we’d had a good relationship before the accident. My mom had died in childbirth, and even though he never said it, I sometimes wonder if he blamed me for killing her when she brought me into this world.
    Finally, he’d left, and the conversation was over. The next morning, when my head had cleared a little, I realized I actually had to find a place to live in order to move out. I didn’t have a