The two sisters didn't see each other the rest of the day. The youngest stayed outside on the porch and the oldest stayed upstairs in her room, ignoring the growl of her stomach when Molly started cooking dinner. Jennifer knew her parents would be disappointed with both of them for behaving like children, but she was much too mad to care right now. She sat down in the corner of her walk-in wardrobe and reached into the depths under some of her dresses. When she'd had this room before they moved away, she hid anything to do with Blake in a secret cubby hole in here. Her thinking at the time had been that if she left anything that might remind her of him here that she'd be able to move on with her life. Of course that had failed spectacularly, because all she'd thought about for years now was that boy and what had happened between them.
She couldn't help but wonder what she'd done wrong for him to treat her the way he had. Blake had promised her the world and, as a 16-17 year old girl, she'd believed him. One of her friends had tried to warn her that she'd heard that he was seeing one or two other girls at the same time. Of course Jennifer hadn't believed them. By the time Jackie had decided to move the girls to Phoenix, Blake had gotten one of those other girls pregnant and, for several horrifying weeks, Jennifer had thought she might have been as well. With her father having just passed away and Molly only being 6, she couldn't tell her mother about everything that had happened so she kept it to herself. The first test she'd taken had given her a false positive, which she didn't know for sure until she'd had two periods (the first of which a few days after taking the test) on time as normal and taken another test. Obviously she was relieved that she wasn't about to become a teenage mother at 18, but a part of her kept missing and caring about Blake. That was what made her almost as angry as his behavior had. Despite everything he'd done, she couldn't switch off her feelings for him and for a long time continued to hope that they would still end up together. And it was why she didn't want her sister hanging out with Jake. Yes Molly was older than she'd been, but she was still too young in her opinion to risk becoming pregnant now. And for all they knew, Blake had taught his younger cousin all of his tricks. She looked at the box of pictures, movie stubs, dried flowers and notes in her hands, remembering some of the things she'd gotten up to with Blake when she thought she was still happy. As much as it hurt, it helped make her mind up.
As much as Molly might hate her for it to begin with, Jennifer was convinced she was doing the right thing in trying to protect her.