AN: Hello all, time for a new chapter! I'm on season 13 of my Degrassi rewatch which feels almost ironic to be writing a Clare being pregnant fic when I'm going to be soon finding out that Clare's pregnant in the show, haha.
Disclaimer: I don't own Degrassi or it's characters, just this idea.
Chapter Six: Leaving it Behind
Once they're parked in front of the Edwards house, Clare takes in a deep breath. Number 26, the house she's lived in her whole life. Or...had lived in. She hadn't been there in days, and it was crazy to think that now she was, according to Drew, breaking in to her own childhood home. She's frozen at the thought of even sneaking out at night, lying to her parents was one thing that she'd wrestled with her whole life growing up. Coming back into her house and sneaking her stuff out in the middle of the day? What was she thinking?
"Uh, Earth to Edwards. We're waiting on you to get us inside the house." Bianca's voice cuts through Clare's thoughts, and Clare turns her head from looking at her house and sees both Bianca and Drew looking at her.
"Are you okay, Clare?" Drew asks, a hint of what Clare can only assume is something of pity or maybe worry in his tone when he speaks to her.
Nodding, Clare unbuckles and slides out of the car as she plasters a smile on her face. "Of course. Let's go."
She's out of the car before she can see Drew and Bianca sharing a look with each other. Bianca wants to ask Drew more questions, questions she's not going to ask Clare while they're about to go into her house, but she doesn't know what to ask or how to ask her boyfriend and she doesn't expect him to tell her anything either. Drew is worried that this is going to be too much for Clare to handle, and he wishes that Adam were there to help her handle this, Adam's always been better at helping people with more emotional stuff than Drew.
When the couple gets out of the car, Clare is picking up a potted plant and sliding away a secret compartment to get the hide-a-key from its secret spot. She never understood why her mother always insisted on putting a hide-a-key in a secret compartment, but she was glad that she knew where it was. Nerves race through Clare as she turns to her front door, taking in a deep breath. After fumbling for a moment, Clare manages to get the key in and the door opens and she holds the second screen door open for Drew and Bianca in too. Out of habit, Clare takes her shoes off and puts them in the cubby section her mother always allotted for her.
"Wow, so this is your house." Bianca comments, looking around and taking a couple of steps into the house. She's not sure what she expected, honestly. From what she knew about the Edwards family she expected something more religious around the house. Even when Fitz had told her and Owen about his brief visit to Clare's house last year, she expected something more from the house.
"Yup." Clare hums, looking around awkwardly. Even though she's been in the house since the day she was brought home from the hospital as a baby, it feels like she's an outsider now. Like this place is completely foreign. The air feels weird to her. "Uh, my room is upstairs." Clare explains and moves to go up the stairs before stopping on the second step before turning back to look at the two of them. She's not sure where her insistence on the next question comes from, but it's so well known and ingrained in her memory from her childhood. "Can you...take off your shoes? Mom hates it when we track in mud and stuff and she's got to clean up."
Walking into her bedroom, Clare takes a breath. It looks like her mother or father had already come back in here and started to do something in here. Boxes were placed in the room, like someone was getting ready to pack things up. It stops Clare in her tracks just a step away from the door frame, catching her off guard, and because of this when Drew and Bianca round the stairs and get to her room they bump into her.
"Oof, Clare...shouldn't you be, uh, more in the room?" Drew asks, raising his eyebrows at her and shifting her so that he and Bianca can get into the room. Then, when he's actually in the room he sees the boxes that have yet to be built and he nods his head slowly, realizing why she'd stopped. "Oh. You okay?"
"What? Yeah. I'm fine. I mean...maybe they were going to pack it all up and bring it to your parents house for me?" The minute Clare says it out loud that doesn't sound likely, though. They were probably planning on packing it all up and stuffing it in the back of the spare room/office closet like they'd done with all of Darcy's old clothes and things when Darcy went away to Africa. That's how her parents dealt with things, right? Put them out of their mind and hid them away until they boiled over and nothing could be ignored any longer.
She hates them. She hates them.
No, she wants to hate them. She wishes she could hate her parents.
"Why are there two beds in here?" Bianca asks, looking around the room and moving to the boxes, helping Drew open them up and set things up. Clare still hasn't actually moved from her spot standing in the doorway of her bedroom, shocked from everything and overwhelmed.
"Darcy and I shared this room, back before she moved to Africa her senior year." Clare explains with a shrug of her shoulders, slowly stepping around the room and flipping through the things she hadn't had the chance to really look through when she'd been rushing the other day. She starts with her desk, looking at the books that cover it, littering it really, and she sorts them based on which ones she want to bring.
"Oh, yeah, I remember hearing about that. Wasn't she seeing that guy who works at The Dot too?" Bianca nods her head.
"Darcy's your older sister, right?" Drew adds.
Clare nods, "Yeah, Darcy's my sister. And, Peter, she was dating him then. He still works there, or I guess he mainly works at Above the Dot now. Cause he and Spinner own The Dot now, like, officially." She's not looking up from everything she's working on, though, because the motion of working is helping her keep calm and focus. If she can focus on her actions and not the world around her, then she has a chance of staying completely calm. She's doing her best not to think about the whole reason why she's got to pack up her childhood bedroom, and just the actual packing up of her childhood bedroom.
The three of them go through Clare's room, talking about things both in their own lives and in the room. Clare's never actually gotten to know Bianca before despite having seen her around over the past few years. Drew she admittedly knows a bit better, but not much. While packing up the room the three of them get to know each other, Clare learns about Bianca living with her Aunt and how she technically tutors Drew in math classes because Audra keeps putting him into the university track math when he doesn't want to. Drew talks about his love of sports and how he's been dealing with sitting on the sidelines because of his past concussion. Clare tells them a bit more about her relationship with Darcy, especially when they get to looking through things in the room that are Darcy's that Clare can't seem to part with.
For a moment, Clare's lost in the pictures on her wall. She looks through everything and picks one up, a Christmas morning photo of the family where everybody is smiling and looking happy, but Clare knows that it's not the case, and that the four of them were not super happy during this moment. Falling to her bed, Clare sighs holds onto the picture frame and down at it while she speaks, "We were never the happiest, you know? Like, Darcy and I weren't close and mom and dad weren't perfect all the time, but we had good times. And then things got bad and I don't think they ever really got better. They tried, or...well, they put on a front and pretended that things got better, I guess. It's been this slope, this downward slope. I don't think that even at our best they would have let me stay in the house now. And I keep trying to email Darcy but every time I try to write it out and tell her what's going on the farthest I can write out is Dear Darcy, I miss you. This year is going crazy already and that's it. I wish I had my family back, but I don't think I ever really had them."
Bianca's taping a box, and looks up at Clare when she's done talking, sighing and leaning forward as she speaks, "Okay, I'm helping you pack up your shit, Edwards. I know next to nothing, just that Drew told me you got kicked out and now I'm listening to your sappy commentary and you look next to tears. I don't want to, like, intrude on your life, but I'm gonna ask what the fuck got Saint Clare kicked out of her house."
"Bianca!" Drew exclaims, turning to look at his girlfriend from fixing up his own box and staring her down.
"Hey, I waited this long." Bianca holds up her hands and looks between Drew and Clare with a shrug of her shoulders.
Clare looks up and nods her head, clearing her throat as she blinks back tears. "No, uh, I guess Bianca's right. I mean, I don't really want to tell anybody. But it's gonna come out eventually anyway. Nobody can keep a secret for long anyway." Clare looks up and turns to Bianca. "Can you keep a secret for now?"
"Who am I gonna tell?" Bianca scoffs with a shrug of her shoulders. "Who's gonna believe I know shit about Clare Edwards anyway."
A quick laugh falls from Clare's lips as she nods her head and looks at Bianca, "Alright, I guess that's fair. Well, my parents kicked me out because I'm pregnant."
Of all things Bianca was expecting Clare to say that was not remotely it, and she blinks at the reveal. "You're...pregnant? Clare Edwards...who wore a catholic school uniform in grade nine and wears a purity ring because she's saving herself for marriage is pregnant?"
Clare nods her head, "Well, I guess I'm not as saintly as that old nickname would have everybody think."
Bianca laughs, shaking her head as she rolls her eyes and replies, "Guess not."
With that said and done, the rest of the packing is basically quiet and almost done. With everything done, Clare has filled five boxes worth of things, both hers and Darcy's things as she can't seem to bear to let go of her sister's things in case anything happens to her room with her parent's plans. The three of them move down the stairs and it takes two trips to get it all out to the car, with Clare grabbing the last box and then looking around the house one last time.
She doesn't have anything downstairs, all of her things were kept in her bedroom, but she feels compelled to look around one last time. Still just wearing her socks, Clare walks around the first floor of the house while Drew and Bianca stand awkwardly by the front door. Clare's looking through the bookshelf downstairs when the phone rings and it makes her pause.
"Do you...you don't think anybody knows we're here, right?" Clare asks, turning to look at Drew and Bianca with a pause, biting her lip nervously as she sighs, shaking her head. She just wants to be able to say goodbye to her house in a way that she wasn't able to the other day. The phone continues to ring in the background and both Drew and Bianca shrug their shoulders.
"You've reached the Edwards household" The voicemail notification rings, a younger Clare's voice recorded onto the machine calling back to everybody and echoing through the quiet house. "Home of Randall, Helen, Darcy, and Clare, but none of us are here right now so leave a message and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you and have a great day!"
Clare blinks, having forgotten about the voicemail message she recorded. She sounded happy, almost, even if she sounded like she was reading from a script too at points. She's about to turn back to the front door and leave the house with Bianca and Drew when the voice on the answering machine stops her.
"Randall, I know you won't be hearing this until you get home from work tonight." Her mother's voice sounds stressed, like she's been crying. "God only knows when that will be, as you seem to be spending every single waking hour at the office. I know that you're not actually working all these hours, Randall. I am not as dumb as you think I am. The final straw was when we lost Clare, I can't do this any longer." The pause is so long that Clare almost thinks that her mother has hung up the phone, but then she keeps speaking, "I cannot keep pretending like this is perfect. Like we're in a good place, Randall. We're not, and we both know this. I can't do this in person, please understand. I'm getting on a plane and I'm going to my hometown. I'll be okay, and so will you. You'll be hearing from my lawyer about a divorce, because I know you've been cheating on me with your secretary for years. Maybe you've already gotten served with papers before you hear this message, I don't know. I loved you when we were younger, Randall. I thought," her mother takes in a deep breath, "I believed that we would be together forever. One man and one woman, we had a beautiful family with two beautiful daughters. And you've been cheating on me for most of the time we've been married. I have proof, so don't think you can deny it. Please, don't call me back, Randall. I won't answer. I loved you once, but I need to love me and take care of me now. Goodbye."
AN: Thanks for reading, I hope you liked this chapter! I want to take a moment to thank everyone who's added this story to their favorites/alerts recently, I noticed that and I appreciate it so much.