January 15th, 1990

They had arrived in Las Vegas at their new house a few days ago, but the majority of their stuff was just now arriving by truck. The neighborhood wasn't anything fancy; in fact, it was more like a trailer with small houses instead of trailers and Joline fit right in. She had already made friends with their neighbors and was currently sitting with them on their porch, drinking and watching Alex move their things into the house, since they didn't have enough money to pay the movers to do it. In a bitter-sweet way, Alex was glad they were kind of poor; it meant less stuff for him to move.

After he was done bringing in boxes and unpacking, Joline sent him off to the grocery store. He hadn't been to the store yet because Joline hadn't bothered to give him money since their neighbors, her new friends, had invited her over for dinner every night since they moved. Joline would give the little amount of leftovers to Alex and say that it was good enough.

When he got back from the store, he opened the fridge to put some of the groceries away. However, when he did, he greeted by the worst smell in the world. The refrigerator held spoiled milk, molded cheese, rotten produce and every other thing that could go bad. Alex quickly slammed the door shut and staggered back, trying not to throw up. Evidently, Joline's mother passed away several weeks ago and no one cleaned out the fridge. The refrigerator must've had a good seal on it because none of them had noticed the rancid smell before.

Joline, seeing Alex was back, came back into the house to retrieve the money left over from the groceries and was greeted by the lingering stench.

"Good Jesus! What fuck is that?" she yelled covering her nose and mouth.

Alex didn't dare open his mouth to answer for fear of throwing up, instead he pointed to the fridge.

"Holy fuck, clean that shit out!" she said, grabbing the money off the counter and practically running back out of the house.

Alex opened all the windows and doors to air the house out as he emptied the refrigerator's contents into the garbage, all the while holding a kitchen towel over his mouth and nose to try to prevent himself from smelling the rotting food. Throwing out the full garbage bag, he sat on the porch for a few minutes, breathing the fresh air to calm his stomach. He was sure he would throw up his breakfast if he'd had any.

His rest was cut short by Joline barking at him to put away the groceries before those went bad as well. Alex grudgingly stood up and went back into the house to do as he was told. As he did, he wondered what happened back in New York when the CPS workers had shown up at their old home. Did they just let the case go or would Casey be pushing them to contact the Las Vegas CPS? He hoped it was the latter.

Later that night, as usual, Joline was out drinking, leaving Alex and Dana home alone again. Dana fell asleep early, giving Alex a chance to catch up on the homework his new teacher assigned him. His class was in the middle of several lesson units that didn't line up with what he had been learning at his old school. Thankfully, the homework wasn't difficult, there was just a lot of it. There was a considerable amount of English homework that took a while to finish, and history also took a long time, but that was because he found it to be rather boring. His math homework wasn't too bad, it was pretty close to what he'd had in New York. The only homework he actually found to be enjoyable was science.

It was a subject he'd always liked and because of that, he would occasionally be harassed by the class bully. He didn't let it bother him though, especially now. There was nothing a bully could do that could be worse than what Joline did.

Every now and then, when Joline was black-out drunk, even she would mock his liking of the subject, saying he got it from his father. He'd hoped that during those moments Joline might inadvertently reveal things about his father. But she didn't, she would only yell and complain about him leaving her. He did learn two things from these occurrences however. The first being that he looked so much like his father that Joline would only yell at him as if he were his father. Second was that his father's name was James. That had taken several drunken incidences of Joline calling Alex 'James' by mistake because it was also Alex's middle name. Tonight would be another one of those nights.

"James, you son of a bitch!" Joline shouted as she barged through the door.

"I'm Alex…" he sighed, closing his science book, knowing no work was going to get done beyond this point.

"Don't lie to me, you asshole!" she snapped and threw his homework from the table, "You always bury yourself in your fuckin' work, ever since I had your goddamn kid!"

Alex said nothing.

"Fine! Just fuckin' ignore me again! And you wonder why I started cheating on you," she grumbled and stalked off to her room.

Nights like these he was glad he looked so much like his father, it acted as a sort of a beating immunity for the night; Joline wouldn't dare to raise her hand at James. That wasn't bad at all, he thought, picking his stuff up off the floor, She must have let it all out at the bar…

o0o0o0o0o0o0o

Author: not the best chapter, just something to bridge ch. 11 and 13