Prologue
I sighed as I sat in the car, riding along with my older brother Glenn and my parents. I rested my head against the cool glass of the passenger's side window. I watched glumly as we drove onwards, passing nothing but busy streets or deserted country roads. My family was moving from our small hometown of Cambridge, Ohio to the ever-popular Los Angeles, California. We had been driving for a few days now, and everyone, no doubt, had started to get restless.
I kept trying to tell myself that this move was going to be good for me, and good for everyone else who was involved. This was a chance for me to start over, and for all of us to have a fresh new beginning. Things hadn't exactly been going as planned for the past two years. Ever since I'd started my freshman year of high school, things had seemed to be going downhill. It wasn't until everything spiraled completely out of control that my parents had even begun to think about relocating our family to someplace new.
Towards the beginning of my freshman year, I came home sick from school one day to find my father, someone who I had originally looked up to and admired, sprawled across the dining room table with one of his co-workers. My mother and two older brothers weren't home at the time, and my father and I wound up having a talk that I, quite frankly was not in the mood for. I had been sent home from school with the stomach flu, and the very sight of them together on the kitchen table wanted me to hurl again. It would've been bad enough to see him and my mother going at it in the kitchen, let alone find out that he was cheating on my mother.
He had begged me not to rat him out, and I had agreed to it. I mean, why wouldn't I have? Do you honestly think that my mother would've believed me if I had tried to tell her. She was the one who was seemingly oblivious to everything. She thought life was just peachy, and that nothing could go wrong. Boy, was she ever wrong.
The next rough patch was hit when my parents discovered that my older brother Glenn had been using the painkillers that he takes for his knee as a recreational drug. He was a major basketball star back at Cambridge High School, and basically, the entire student body looked up to him. He is the point guard, after all. While all of the girls were either fawning over him or throwing themselves at him, all of the other guys, jocks and nerds alike, were impressed with his impeccable skills and wanted to be just like him. To them, Glenn Carlin served as a role model. Some role model.
My parents got him into counseling and started monitoring him more closely. He does fairly well now, but since they've begun to notice that, the guard has been let down little by little, and I know for a fact that he's been known to slip up again a few times here and there. I only know this because I've seen him do it. No matter how many times he's tried to fully quit, it just doesn't seem as though it's possible. He's simply just hooked. My brother, the basketball star. He's addicted to getting high off of painkillers.
My whole family should've known that after three strikes, we should have been out of there. As in, left Cambridge, Ohio completely in the dust. Unfortunately, my parents don't know how to take a hint. When I was in my sophomore year of high school and Glenn was in his junior year, some idiot had decided to bring a gun to school. Once an administrator had found out about it, the school was pronounced to be in lockdown. It had happened right in between class periods, and everyone was in the hallways at the time. When the warning had come on over the P.A. system, students were frantically ushered into classrooms, regardless of where they were actually supposed to be at the time. I remember that I wound up sitting in some teacher's classroom that I had never known before, around all of these people that I was unfamiliar with. I'm pretty sure that it was a classroom meant for seniors.
Anyways, we remained in lockdown for about four or five hours. Everyone had been called. Police officers, alongside their bomb-sniffing dogs, firefighters, and ambulances. Students were frantically trying to call their parents on their cell phones, but most of the time, that didn't go over so well. The teachers eventually ended up gaining possession of most of the ones in the classroom, remarking simply that, "it was not advisable for us to use our cell phones at this given time". I'm not quite sure what would've been considered as a better time. I certainly couldn't have made a phone call to my family after I was dead.
Dead…that's what the doctors told my parents, my older brother, and me when the lockdown was over, and we were able to make it to the hospital. My other older brother, Clay, a senior, was dead. The gunman had shot and killed him, along with six others. He also wounded about twenty others, but they had somehow managed to escape with minor gunshot wounds. My adopted older brother was 17 years old at the time. He never quite got the chance to graduate from high school.
Clay was a wonderful brother, son, and friend to all. He had that type of quality where he was nice to everyone, at least until someone gave him a reason not to be. Most of the other kids' whose siblings were killed in the riot either left school, or transferred. After a month, Glenn and I had returned. My parents had insisted upon it.
I became one of the main gossip factors of my high school's hallway. I wasn't just paranoid, trust me. I heard the whispers flying around from every direction. "There's that girl whose brother got killed…you know, in the shooting," they'd tell one another. I absolutely hated it. I despised being the center of attention. It really bothered me beyond all belief. I had been very close to my brother, and I was strongly devastated by the painful loss. His girlfriend at the time was not doing much better, to say the least.
Then, at the beginning of this summer, I found out that my father lost his job. We should have seen it coming. The US economy has been consistently spiraling downwards. Once he got laid off from work, he also lost his little fuck buddy from the office as well. She too had lost her job, and was spending a good portion of her time with her own family, because otherwise, they would have gotten suspicious. I guess that's just how it goes. What happens at the office, stays at the office. Poor dad. Not.
After learning that he had lost his job, my father had sunken into this deep sort of depression that involved drinking lots of alcohol whenever possible. Whenever he was sober, my father was fine. When he was drunk off of his ass, however, now that was a different story. The littlest things seemed to upset him or set him off, so you had to be very careful around him when he was in one of his moods like that. If you weren't, you might end up getting pulled by the hair, slapped across the face, or pushed up against a wall. Any one of these things qualified as unfortunate. My mother didn't appear to be any help. She just gently told us that our father was having a rough time because of being out of work, and that we should try not to upset him so much. "You know how he gets," she'd say.
Because he lost his job, my mother at least did the right thing in making him get back up off of his ass and start looking for a new job. As it turns out, there was one available…in Los Angeles, California, as a matter of fact. However, his desire for excessive amounts of alcohol seemed to stick with him. He had always enjoyed having a drink or two every now and then, but once he'd started drinking heavily, he just couldn't seem to stop. And Glenn and I hated it. My mother, on the other hand, as usual, remained completely oblivious to the world around her. For some reason, whenever my father was angry, he always either hit me or my older brother. But he never dared to lay a hand on our precious mother.
Needless to say, all of this drama led to me not being able to eat or sleep very properly. The only thing that hadn't started to suffer, surprisingly, were my grades. Probably because whenever my father was drunk, or I was depressed about missing Clay, I just shut myself out from the rest of the world. I holed up in my room and worked diligently on my schoolwork. I literally forced myself to study. If I kept busy, then things weren't always as bad as they'd seemed. If I kept my mind of something else and worked hard, then I didn't cut myself, and I didn't become so upset that I would throw up whatever I'd eaten earlier that day. I was so upset that I was probably causing myself to become anorexic, and not by choice. I also discovered that there was the possibility that I'd turned into a downright insomniac. There was no doubt about it. I was a complete and total mess. Actually, I think that we all were.
That's why, when my parents had announced our move, I was actually somewhat happy. Glenn had thrown a fit about not being able to play on the same basketball team in the fall, and I was a little upset by the prospect of leaving the few friends that I actually had left. But that was it. Overall, we viewed this move as beneficial for all parties who were involved.
I made up my mind right then and there. I started viewing this little adventure as a new opportunity for myself. I could start over at a new school, and maybe make some new friends. Or then again, maybe not. I'd started preferring to be on my own and independent. I didn't hang out with people as often, because I didn't need them getting wrapped up in all of my drama. Honestly now, who would want to put someone else through hell and back again? I was far better off just keeping to myself.
But here, in Los Angeles, California, nobody knew me as "that's the girl whose brother died in the gun shooting." They didn't even know who I was at all. They didn't have any information about my name or my appearance. They knew that a gun shooting had occurred. The names of the people who were killed in the riot weren't released on the news. Everyone who had been shot was under the age of 18. This made them minors, and parents didn't need the whole world knowing about their problems. Mostly, they just kept to themselves and grieved silently.
Now that I would be starting out in a completely new environment, everything was bound to get better…wasn't it? I mean, I couldn't possibly imagine anything possibly getting any worse. That was my motivation. That was my newly adopted way of looking at things. No one in Los Angeles would know about mine and my family's past. I was determined to walk the neighborhood and the hallways of my new school with my head firmly planted on my shoulders. I would have that instant fake smile constantly pasted across my face. I would just simply appear as though nothing was wrong. I would become a great pretender of sorts. It was the only way that I knew how to deal with all of the emotional and physical pain that I was feeling.
Besides, my mother had decided to make an honest effort out of this move. Once we got settled in, she claimed to promise that we would get family counseling and grief counseling. My father would be subject to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and for my brother, drug counseling. Her and my father were also going to get some marriage counseling. Or so she claimed, at least.
My father's voice interrupted my thoughts. "We're here!" he announced cheerfully, pulling up into the driveway of a beautifully landscaped home. As I looked out the window of the car once more, I think my heart skipped a beat. Maybe this is just what my family and I needed.
There was a little bit of front garden displayed on either side of the home. The walkway leading up to the front porch was made of some sort of cobblestone. The house itself was mostly white, with some dark teal outlines around the windowpanes and the roof of the small balcony that stood on the second floor. The mailbox and our house number were elegantly placed on the house near our front door. The whole plot of land was outlined by a white picket fence. There was a big backyard with a pool out back. It looked exactly like the type of house I had always planned on owning when I got older, moved out, and got my own place.
The moving van pulled up behind us. After we opened the front door to our new home, the movers started ushering in all sorts of large pieces of furniture. Amidst all of the chaos, I went up to the second story of the house and chose my new bedroom. It was perfect…not too big, and not too small. I later discovered that it came equipped with its own walk-in closet and bathroom, which was pretty nice. Yes, I was definitely going to try and make the most of this.
After the movers had left, our family seemed to have a constant flow of visitors coming in and out of our new home for the next couple of hours. New neighbors welcomed us with casseroles, Jell-O molds, and the works. By the time I was finally able to start unpacking, it was time for dinner. By the end of the night, the only thing that had really been unpacked was my bed, just so that I could sleep in it.
For the next week and a half, all I did was unpack, unpack, and unpack. You know, just taking the time to get things into place. Once I'd finally gotten settled in, there was only one thing left to worry about. I had to swallow the gigantic lump in my throat every time that I wound up thinking about it. About the prospect of school. Not only was I the new kid in town, but I would have to face junior year without any friends, completely alone, in a high school that was huge compared to my old one. I had been told that this campus held roughly 4,000 students. Now I was going to have to face being one of them. Knowing me, I would probably get lost as well.
That night, I tossed and turned in bed as I tried desperately for sleep. When I finally fell into a restless sleep, I had nothing but terrifying nightmares, all revolving around the topic of school. I probably woke up in a cold sweat about three or four different times during the night.
"Doomed," I'd said at 4:00 in the morning, out loud to the empty room. "That's what I am…totally and completely doomed."
I stuffed a pillow over my face in an attempt to smother myself as I waited for the dawn to break.
Author's Note: Okay, so here's the deal. I definitely don't own the television show South of Nowhere, or it's characters. I do, however, own my storyline. Reviews, criticism, and ideas are certainly always welcome. If I use even the tiniest part of a reviewer's idea, then I make sure that I credit them in my next chapter's Author's Note. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and that you will continue to read. Thanks!