Going Nowhere At Full Speed

Ava’s parents had gone to their hotel room, promising to return at exactly seven that night so they could go to dinner. Just as Ava had said, they pretended as if they hadn’t said all of those horrible things to her.

Chloe was over at Ava’s apartment trying to help her get ready for the evening since her parents had wanted to go to one of the fancier restaurants in Chicago. She was sitting on her bed while Ava straightened her hair. “I can’t believe you’re still going out with your parents after what they did this afternoon,” Chloe told her.

“I’ve already went through this a million times. They’re my parents no matter what,” Ava said with a sigh, having already said the same thing at least twenty times already.

“So, you’re telling me that I should go back and live with Dirk because he’s my father?” Chloe questioned.

“No, of course not!” Ava exclaimed. “Dirk treats you terribly. I’d never tell you to go back with him!”

“What’s the difference?” Chloe asked.

“Well,” Ava began, and then she suddenly stopped, not being able to think of any reasons why it was different. “I don’t know. But, I do know that you are not going back to Dirk, and I’m going out with my parents tonight.”

“Okay,” Chloe said, knowing there was nothing she was going to be able to say to make Ava change her mind about going to dinner. “So,” she said, changing subjects. “How excited are you to be going on your first date with Brent?” she asked jokingly.

Ava turned around and glared at the younger girl. “You know this is not a date,” Ava told her, turning off her straightener. “This is Brent being nice and coming with me after he went along with my lie about having a boyfriend,” she said logically.

“Or, it’s his way of getting to go out on a date with you without having to tell you how he really feels,” Chloe said smirking.

Ava rolled her eyes as she heard the doorbell ring. She glanced at her clock to see it was 6:45, so she knew it wasn’t her parents. When they said they would be there at seven, they would ring the doorbell exactly at seven. She walked out to the living room and opened the door, finding a suit-clad Brent on the other side. Her breath caught a moment as her eyes glanced over him. “Hey, doesn’t Ava look nice?” Chloe called out, pulling both Brent and Ava away from their thoughts.

“Gorgeous,” Brent said, keeping his eyes focused on Ava, who was blushing.

All of a sudden, ‘You Found Me’ by The Fray started playing, and everyone looked around, trying to figure out where it was coming from. Chloe grabbed her phone out of her pocket, glancing at the caller id before picking it up. “Hey,” she said into the phone, and Brent and Ava turned around to look at her, trying to figure out who she was talking to.

“Yeah, they’re supposed to be here at seven. Do you want to come over at like 7:30 or something?” Chloe asked into the phone. “Okay, I’ll see you then. Bye!”

“Who was that?” Ava asked Chloe once she had closed the phone.

“Kris. He’s coming over. I think we’re going to watch movies or something,” Chloe said with a smile on her face. Brent had noticed that since she and Kris had started dating, Chloe seemed to be smiling a lot more often.

“Have fun,” Ava told her.

“Yeah, you have fun, too,” Chloe said, while Ava tried to fight back a smile at Chloe’s sarcasm. “I’ll see you later,” she said, walking back to her apartment.

“So,” Brent said, turning around to look at Ava after he heard the Chloe shut the door behind her. “Are you ready for this?”

“Yeah,” Ava told him with a nod of her head. “Seriously, when they first get here, you won’t even recognize them. They’ll be completely different than when you saw them this afternoon. And, then, I’ll do something at dinner, and they’ll go off on me.”

“You know you don’t have to do this, right?” Brent asked.

“Yeah, I know,” Ava told him. “But I want to. And, I want to thank you for coming with me.”

“No problem,” he said as the doorbell rang.

Ava looked at the clock and saw it said 7:00. “That’s my parents,” she told Brent, walking to the door and opening it to see her parents standing there, all dressed up. “Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad,” she said to them, giving them each a hug.

“Hello, Ava, Brent,” Lori said, looking over at Brent. “Are you two ready to go?”

“Yeah, let me just grab my phone,” Ava said, snatching it up before walking out the door behind her parents, turning around to lock the door behind her.

An hour later, they were having what appeared to be a nice dinner. Bill and Lori would make a random comment about Ava every once in a while, but it was nothing like that afternoon.

But, just as Ava had said it would, the nice dinner soon turned into a disastrous one. To keep the conversation going, Brent had turned to Ava, asking her how work was going for her. “It’s great,” she told him with a smile.

“Are you still working in that hospital as a nurse?” Lori had asked her.

“Yeah, Mom,” Ava told her, knowing exactly where this was going to go.

“Why can’t you get a better job? You know that you’re not going to be able to start a family if you’re a nurse at a hospital. Those hours are terrible!” Lori told her.

“Mom, I like my job, you know that,” Ava countered.

“You know,” Bill began, looking over at Brent. “We always wanted Ava to be a doctor. She just wasn’t good enough to become one. But, I guess that’s a good thing. Could you imagine Ava being a doctor? She would probably kill half of the people that came in to see her!” he said with a laugh.

“I’m sure Ava would have made an amazing doctor,” Brent told Bill.

“I didn’t want to be a doctor, remember, Dad. I always wanted to be a nurse. You wanted to me to be a doctor,” she reminded him.

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Bill told her, his voice growing louder. Ava looked at him, confused. What tone was he talking about? “You should be grateful you had parents that wanted you to be something great. We should be the ones upset with you for not doing something better with your life.”

“Dad, I’m—“ Ava began before Bill interrupted her.

“You’re such a disappointment to us, Ava,” he continued. He looked over at Brent. “I don’t know why you’re with her. You could do so much better!”

“It’s true,” Lori spoke up, nodding in agreement with her husband.

“Ava’s just an ungrateful, little bitch. You should break up with her before—“ Bill began before Brent stood up, punching him square in the face.

Ava looked on in horror, shocked that Brent had just hit her father, who now had blood gushing from his nose. “Brent!” she cried as her mother turned to look at Bill, trying to hold a napkin up to his nose to stop the bleeding.

Lori glared at Brent. “You deserve that little bitch over there,” she muttered.

“Come on,” Brent said, grabbing Ava’s hand and pulling her up. He threw some money onto the table to pay for their dinner, and then guided her through the restaurant to his car.

Once they were inside the car and on the road, Ava turned to look at Brent. “Brent, what the hell was that? You just punched my father!” she exclaimed.

“What did you expect me to do?” Brent questioned. “Just sit there and listen to them say those horrible things about you? I wasn’t going to let them talk to you like that.”

“So, you decide to punch my father?” she asked incredulously. When he didn’t say anything, Ava continued. “What happens if he decides to try and press charges against you?”

“He won’t,” Brent told her.

“But, what if he does? Or what if someone at the restaurant recognized you? It’s going to be all over the news.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brent told her.

“Don’t worry about it?” she repeated, not understanding how he could be so calm about everything.

“Ava, you’re more important that all of that,” he said, pulling into the parking lot of their apartment complex.

“What?” Ava asked, looking over at Brent.

Instead of answering, Brent leaned over, putting his hand behind her head, bringing her closer until their lips connected. Pulling away, he repeated, “You’re more important than all of that.”