Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Three Sixty: A Companion to Small Circles
    Three Sixty: A Companion to Small Circles
    Three Sixty: A Companion to Small Circles
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    Three Sixty: A Companion to Small Circles

    By Megan Duke

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Three Sixty is a story about a group of friends. You may recognize two of them as the younger siblings of Larson Ashby and Jade Walbridge, but that does not mean you know them. Audrina, Paxton, and Larson meet Carter after he decides to spend the summer with his older sister Jade. Set during the summer before Audrina's freshman year of college, over the course of those four months, the friends come face to face with jealousy, regret, freedom, and the true meaning of love. As a companion to the novel Small Circles, Three Sixty promotes the notion that it's okay to be happy, even if you have to completely turn your life around, and start over, in order to achieve that.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateOct 23, 2013
    ISBN9781483524818
    Three Sixty: A Companion to Small Circles

    Read more from Megan Duke

    Related to Three Sixty

    Related ebooks

    Coming of Age Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      ‘Out With The Bins’

      Mar 5, 2023

      ‘Out With The Bins’
      5 min read

    • Article

      Summer Reading Guide

      Jan 2, 2022

      Summer Reading Guide
      6 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Oct 12, 2022

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Nov 4, 2021

      Shelf Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      Isla No Place Like Home

      Nov 2, 2022

      Isla No Place Like Home
      10 min read

    • Article

      Isla No Place Like Home

      Nov 2, 2022

      Isla No Place Like Home
      10 min read

    • Article

      ‘It’s Really Strange To Be Reminded Of Your Perpetually Dead Parents’: Frieda Hughes On Her Famous Literary Family And Her Magpie Memoir George

      Apr 28, 2023

      ‘It’s Really Strange To Be Reminded Of Your Perpetually Dead Parents’: Frieda Hughes On Her Famous Literary Family And Her Magpie Memoir George
      9 min read

    • Article

      Evenings with Clarice Lispector’s Newest Translator

      Apr 24, 2018

      1. “I’ve been working on the translation nonstop—it’s like I’m in a trance,” Magdalena Edwards told me in early March 2017, while preparing a gin and tonic at her house in Santa Monica. I walked there from my place—we live very close to one another.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 21, 2023

      Books
      3 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Oct 5, 2022

      Great Read
      3 min read

    • Article

      Lost for WORDS

      Sep 23, 2020

      Lost for WORDS
      6 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jul 22, 2019

      Elsa Joubert is best known for The Long  Journey of Poppie Nongena, but she also wrote a lot about her travels through Africa. In Cul-de-Sac she describes a journey of another kind: into proper old age (she is 95). Elsa moves into Berghof, a retirem

      4 min read

    • Article

      Reader Reviews

      Feb 6, 2019

      BY CATHERINE FISHER Firefly Press £6.99 REVIEW by Liza, agethirteen I have so much to say about this unforgettable novel. Set in Wales, in Victorian times, our main protagonist, Seren, leaves her dismal orphanage to visit Plas-y-Fran. Litt

      6 min read

    • Article

      This Is Not a Defense of the Power of Art

      Jan 25, 2018

      If you’ve never cried while reading a book or watching a movie, this essay isn’t for you. There are only three times I remember out and out weeping in response to either: As a child on the roof of my mother’s house, in my wife’s and my first apartmen

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki

      Dec 9, 2018

      To start, a list of the books I enjoyed very, very much: I expected to like Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel, The Golden State, not only because she is my friend, but because I only made her be my friend after reading her genius nonfiction on this very w

      4 min read

    • Article

      I Met Fear on the Hill

      Dec 15, 2018

      It’s the summer of 1966, and Sheila and Peter are a young married couple living in Berkeley. They are very much in love, and also very high—tripping on acid for the first time in their lives, in Tilden Park—walking in a shallow stream full of primord

      32 min read

    • Article

      The Unauthorised Version

      Mar 28, 2021

      The Unauthorised Version
      13 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Aug 20, 2021

      ‘Brood’ is such a multi-layered word: thinking deeply about something, a group of young animals, something to do with longed-for motherhood… and this beautiful, spare book is about all of those, and more. The protagonist (she’s never named) and her h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Home & away

      Oct 30, 2022

      Home & away
      3 min read

    • Article

      Reader Reviews

      Jun 5, 2019

      BY ANNE BOOTH Catnip h £6.99 REVIEW by Michelle, age ten This book is a book like no other! This book has links to history but is also very interesting. It takes us on an adventure to the remote island of Lindisfarne. Anyone who reads it can

      6 min read

    • Article

      Grandma Ruth’s UP Truck Stop

      May 10, 2021

      Rachel’s last semester at the University of Michigan would have been easy if not for the news that reached her six weeks before her final exams. It wasn’t a phone call—the phone lines were still down from the most recent blizzard to hit Paradise, she

      28 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Three Sixty

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Three Sixty - Megan Duke

      gist.

      PART 1 - MAY

      Audrina Ashby was never the person to change the world. Mostly, she sat back and watched as others did that for her. She also wasn’t the person to take things too seriously. Everything mattered, but only to a certain extent.

      When she and her brother, Larson, were in middle school, other kids spread rumors that he might be gay. Audrina always shrugged it off and exchanged the same amount of contempt she received. Even in Larson’s seventh grade year, when the rumors became fact and he was actually caught kissing a boy in public – he owned up to it later himself at the dinner table on Christmas Eve – Audrina didn’t make it a big deal. Audrina Ashby was the ultimate version of carefree. It wasn’t because she was so happy with her life that nothing could ever taint her perfect world. It was the exact opposite of that, actually. Audrina was so miserable, all the time, with little to no one ever knowing what was actually going on inside her head, that literally nothing was important enough to make her care. There were only three people in her life that could ever extract the truth from within her bitter and lackluster veins: Larson - her brother and her best friend, Paxton – the only boy that had ever mattered to her, and Owen – their friend that had been killed in a car accident eight months before.

      It was a long time before any of them knew exactly what had killed Owen. They thought for a while that he had been suffocated by the airbag, or even that he had injured something in his neck that resulted in the first responders pronouncing him dead at the scene. Eventually, the autopsy report came back showing that where he’d been hit, something had crushed his chest, collapsing his lungs and stopping his heart almost immediately. The only thing that comforted Larson, was knowing that his boyfriend’s death had been somewhat quick. That fact didn’t comfort Audrina or Paxton. It helped Jade – Paxton’s girlfriend and Owen’s ex – but only slightly. Their small circle was complicated, but Audrina didn’t feel the need to take time and understand it. Bad things had happened to all of them in the years that had passed, but it was inevitable that things would get better. After all, that’s what everyone says, right?

      Audrina had it in her head for a while that when she turned nineteen everything was going to be better. Everything was going to be different. In the fall, Audrina would be attending her first semester of college. She was going to find a new circle of friends and reshape herself into the person she thought she should be. So far, however, things were looking too similar to how they’d always been. So far, nothing had changed.

      Audrina had always been known as a friendly girl - mostly to the guys she surrounded herself with, because they were the main subjects of her camaraderie. Don’t take this the wrong way, but Audrina was kind of a slut. Larson would never admit that, for he thought the world of his sister. Paxton, however, could speak first hand about the subject. Paxton had been Audrina’s first. They had been each other’s, actually, and they’d formed a special bond because of that. Whenever she was lonely, or unsatisfied with the endless amount of attention she received, she ran to Paxton – the one she could always come back to, no matter what. That was until Paxton fell in love with Jade. Her long, tanned legs and dark hair were forces to be reckoned with. There was no way Audrina’s blonde hair and pale complexion could compete with Jade’s exotic exterior. She only had one thing that made her stand out in comparison, and that was her eyes. Her Heterochromia made her different, but it mostly freaked people out. Despite her confidence, Audrina had felt threatened by Jade since day one, but it wasn’t something she could admit or show. She always held her own when Jade was present, and made it a point to remind her, and everyone else in the room, that she and Paxton used to fuck. It made her look like a complete bitch, but Audrina was okay with that. At least people remembered her that way.

      On a humid day in May, Audrina and Larson were sitting outside on their parent’s back porch. They were eating from a bowl of frozen fruit and discussing the possibilities of the summer ahead of them. It would have to be epic, as previously discussed, due to it being Audrina’s last summer as a high school student and Larson’s opportunity to get back out there, even though he still wasn’t quite sure where there was.

      We should just do a bunch of shit we’ve always wanted to do but never tried, Larson suggested, sucking out the juice from a frozen grape.

      Audrina perked up. Like scuba diving!

      We’d need an ocean for that. Or at least a body of water with something worth looking at on the bottom.

      Which means we’d have to go somewhere else, Audrina elaborated. A.K.A. doing something we’ve never done before. We could go somewhere crazy like the Bahamas or Tahiti or something.

      Larson squinted his skeptical green eyes. Are you gonna be the one to suggest that to mom?

      Audrina didn’t say anything. She merely rolled her eyes and went back to her bowl of strawberries and kiwi.

      It was odd how easily Audrina got along with her brother. It hadn’t always been that way. When they were younger, they fought just like any other siblings would. They bickered over who got to choose the channel when both of their favorite shows aired at the same time, and they screamed to whatever parent would listen when the other stole something that was invaluable – the last slice of leftover birthday cake or the front passenger seat in their dad’s Camaro. They even initiated the traditional freeze-out if things got extremely heated. One time, when Audrina was eight and Larson was nine, Larson took the liberty of dying all of Audrina’s Barbie’s hair black and coloring tattoos on their skin. She didn’t speak to him for a month.

      Now, however, things weren’t so competitive between them. They connected on their taste in men, and even shared horror stories when things didn’t end well on dates. Larson was always there to back his little sister if some pervert got too frisky, and Audrina never let anyone diminish Larson’s manhood because of his sexual preference. They had a mutual understanding to defend and protect the name Ashby, and so far, it had proven to be somewhat unscathed.

      Alright, Audrina spoke up after a few moments of thought and two bites of fruit. What about Florida? We’ve been there before, but we’ve never done any of the really fun stuff. Taylor said that last time she went, she and her mom went parasailing.

      Seems dangerous.

      Seems exciting.

      Larson twisted his lips into a smile. Well, alright then. Let’s do it.

      Audrina jumped from her seat and tossed the fruit bowl onto the table in front of them. Yes! This summer is gonna be epic! All of us together. We’ll take a road trip!

      There was a moment of silence. Not all of us, Larson added regretfully. He suddenly became solemn, lowering his head to his lap to stare at his hands.

      Audrina knew who was missing. It was Owen, and now she regretted bringing it up in the first place.

      Carter had already started packing. He’d had it planned for weeks that he was going to spend the summer with his sister, Jade, in Nashville. She’d recently dropped the news that she and her boyfriend had officially moved in together. To their parents, Jade’s announcement provoked a long discussion about being safe and not forgetting that being young is a good thing. Mostly, they were afraid she’d get hitched at nineteen and come back with a baby the next time she visited. To Carter, however, this piece of information proved to be vital. It meant that a small window of opportunity had been allotted to get out of Boston and officially start his life – one that didn’t involve high school cliques or old relationships coming back to bite him in the ass.

      Nothing had ever been simple with Carter Walbridge. His last name in itself had given him grief since he was old enough to talk. From the time he started elementary school, kids labeled him the troubled rich kid, and instead of disputing this, he went along with it. Carter figured it was easier to just give people what they want instead of fighting against it, when really, it didn’t matter that much to begin with. He’d missed out on a lot - given that his social status narrowed his choice of friends - but at the same time, he’d been presented with just as much gain. Being that guy in high school that everyone knew made it a lot easier to get whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. Girls were never an issue. Doors opened at the very mention of his name for parties. Even teachers bowed at his feet due to the fear of what repercussions could come if they were to fail him. Secretly, as much as Carter hated the spotlight, he couldn’t live without it.

      When both he and his sister were offered to attend Foster and Allan - a boarding school in the middle of a field somewhere in Chattanooga - Carter had respectfully declined. He’d told his parents that it was because he didn’t want to leave his friends. Partially it was true, but what they didn’t understand was that the actual people behind the word friends was not what held him in place. It was the word alone Carter was desperate to hold on to. He was afraid that if he abandoned his throne, he might not get another chance to earn it back. Jade needed new friends. Carter had witnessed first hand the ridicule she received from new rumors and old stories haunting her in the halls. He felt for his older sister, and when she left for boarding school, he wished her luck, knowing it was the best thing for her.

      For eighteen years, Carter had successfully ruled his miniscule kingdom. Now, with college ahead and a summer open to an endless amount of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1