Time Trials Read Online Free PDF Page A

was more than this small protective bubble which had been her life. Maybe not everyone only liked cheese pizza or disliked “shit on shingles.” Maybe there were people, people her age, who actually challenged the thought process they had been taught. The idea scared and exhilarated her at the same time.   
    “You okay, Sugar?” her dad asked. “You look a little distracted. Getting a little nervous?”
    “No, Dad, I’m fine, really.” Gazing out the window at the passing scenery, her eyes narrowed. The hell with being a people-pleaser. Maybe her parents could only afford for her to go to college one year, but damn it, something good could happen during that time. Something different. Totally different from the life she’d been living.
    Her fixed glare out the window turned into a smile, and for the first time in quite a while, she smiled on the inside too.
    “Uh, you know, I probably won’t be coming home every weekend.” The shift in her thinking suddenly opened up a plethora of ideas. “I mean, Dena will have her car, but unless she decides to come home, Janie and I are pretty much stuck in Huntsville.” There, she’d set the precedent.
    Her mother whirled her head around to the back seat. “But, what about Denny? Won’t he be expecting you home every weekend?” Of course her mom would bring him up. Denny had landed a partial football scholarship at the University of Houston, and although he’d be living in the athletic dorm, it was still in Houston.
    What about Denny? This is my time. “Uh, we decided to see other people.” Sorta , she thought.
    “What?” The expression on her mother’s face mirrored something far more catastrophic than learning her daughter and her boyfriend were seeing other people. “When did this happen? You didn’t say anything!”
    Besides her mother’s horrified expression, she caught her dad’s own puzzled look through the rearview mirror.
    “Really, you guys, it’s okay.” She mentally ripped off the people-pleaser sign on her forehead and felt a flutter in her chest, like a butterfly breaking loose from its cocoon and spreading its wings for the first time. Her lungs filled with much needed air. She was going to be okay.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 5
     
    Regina Westmoreland - 1972
     
    “Can’t you drive any faster?”
    “I could, Mother, but the police are always out on this road.” Regina checked the speedometer of her mother’s Cutlass Supreme and kept her eyes open once they passed the Tyler city limits sign. “I could get a ticket for my speed now. And look….” She released her hands and pointed to the vibration of the steering wheel. “Isn’t that an alignment problem or something?”
    “What are you, Miss Auto Mechanic?” Patricia Westmoreland lit a cigarette and cracked the window a tad on the passenger side. “Besides, as soon as I get that GTO, this baby will be yours.”
    “Why do I get the Cutlass and you get the GTO?” She waved smoke out of her face, knowing she’d smell like a chimney by the time she got to Huntsville.
    “Because I’m the mom and I say so.”
    “Did I ever tell you how much I hate that line?” Regina gritted her teeth and wished for the millionth time she had a normal parent. Her dad had taken off when raising a child interfered with his lifestyle, and her mother…well, her mother was too old to be a flower child, but by God she’d taken on the role anyway, wearing patched bell bottom jeans and fringed vests, complete with beads and a headband. Last week Regina had caught her mother leaving the house wearing a paisley mini dress and white patent knee boots to meet some guy at a bar.
    “Yeah, I know it sucks.” Patricia flicked her cigarette out the window, exhaled the last of the smoke that filled her lungs, and turned to her daughter. “But, what are ya gonna do, right? I heard it for years from my grandma…maybe it was my aunt.” She paused for a minute, as if she might honestly be trying to recall that