The Green Grass Grows Again

By Lauren Thell

One month after handing herself to a boy who ground her heart to silt and sprinkled it out for the entire school to see, sixteen-year-old Mia itches to come out of hiding and resume a normal life. But the days of going out with friends and not running into people who have seen more of her than she ever would have shown them are over. Some mistakes can't be undone.

When her fixation with Four-Eyed Jay—the awkward-cute boy next door—becomes an obsession, Mia decides to take a chance. As she prepares to cross the stretch of grass between her house and Jayden's, however, she can't dismiss the nagging thought that sometimes you don't get a second chance.

And she might have already missed her first.

A YA Christian fiction short story, 31 pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lauren Thell
• Release date: Oct 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215521410

Lauren Thell

Lauren Thell is an author of Christian YA fiction full of characters who find themselves on the undersides of impossible situations. She is a professional musician, an amateur dancer, and a wannabe astronaut.

Book preview

Chapter 1: The Blackened Field

Mia peered through a narrow gap between her curtains, feeling every bit a stalker as she watched Jayden King emerge from the house next door. Faded jeans and a lime green Eiffel 65 T-shirt emphasized his gangly physique. He bounced down the steps with a springy gait, and though she couldn’t hear him through the closed window, the shape of his lips told her he was whistling.

Four-Eyed Jay. That’s the name her friend Katie had dubbed him in fourth grade. He no longer wore glasses, but everyone still called him that. Trish said he was a first-rate dork. Lanae, the most open-minded of Mia’s friends, described him as lacking in social and physical grace.

A gust of summer wind took a shot at Jayden’s Brewers baseball cap. He lunged for it, his keys flying from his hand as he grappled with the hat and smashed it down on his cinnamon-brown hair.

Mia giggled—then shrank back when his gaze shot toward her. He couldn’t have heard her, right? No, the movement of the curtain must have caught his eye. She took a cautious peek and watched as he turned his cap backward on his head and swiped his keys from the grass. His whistling resumed a second later. When he started for the prehistoric Chevy parked at the curb, Mia huffed a blissful sigh, beyond grateful her friends weren’t there to hear it.

They would laugh her out of the state if they knew of her recent infatuation with Four-Eyed Jay. A month ago, she would have laughed, too.

But, seriously, four weeks of exile did strange things to the mind. It made you notice anomalies like the misaligned strip of wallpaper in the closet, and how the three red lights on the cell tower visible from your bedroom window didn’t blink in unison. It tortured you with regret over mistakes that couldn’t be undone and worth that couldn’t be reclaimed. Perhaps most baffling of all, it roused your awareness of a boy you’d discounted for years.

That’s what happened in the early days of Mia’s self-imposed banishment from civilization. She had just settled in to watch a spider weave a web under the eave above her window when a tall young man rode up to the King’s house, leaned his bicycle against the wall, and ascended the porch steps using Jayden’s lanky