Chapter 1
“I can’t believe your parents are forcing you to leave. It should be, like, illegal. You’re over eighteen. Why don’t you just bail?” Kelly sat on top of one of the boxes of my almost-packed dorm room and snapped her gum. When we’d first met, the little habit had irritated me to no end, but I’d gotten used to it.
“I wish I could, but they’re footing the bill for school, so right now I’m screwed,” I said. Not to mention the fact that no one said no to my mother. No one.
“Why don’t you drop out?” Oh, I’d considered that more than once. Actually, more than a thousand times. It was impossible to explain the complicated dynamic of my family to someone like Kelly, who had moved out of her parents’ house and gotten her own place when she was still in high school.
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging and taping up another box. Kelly flipped her dirty blond dreadlocked ponytail and cracked her gum again. She’d asked me if I needed help packing, but so far all she’d done was bother me.
“You’ll come back and visit, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I told her with a little smile. We both knew it was unlikely that I’d ever get back here. I folded my University of New Hampshire blanket and shoved it into another box. My mom had bought it for me two summers ago as a going-away-to-college present.
I was one of only two of my siblings or steps who’d actually managed to graduate high school, let alone get accepted somewhere. Neither Mom nor Dad nor any of my stepparents had finished high school, so it was a big deal for any of us to make it that far. The only other one who had was Renee, and that was the reason they were shipping me back to Maine to live with her after...everything.
Kelly’s phone buzzed and she typed a quick response to the text message and grinned at me.
“Mac wants to meet up for coffee.” I always wished she’d put coffee in air quotes, because we both knew that it meant getting stoned and hooking up in the backseat of his rusty Pontiac. Kelly and her boyfriend were notorious; they’d even been caught by campus security in the middle of the day. It was a miracle they were still students at all. I think they were holding on by the thinnest of academic threads.
“Have fun.” I knew she’d bail on me for Mac. She always did. Kelly wasn’t much of a friend, but she was the only one I had. The others had ditched me months ago.
“Call me before you leave. I wanna say goodbye.” She got up and gave me a loose hug. It was more of a lean involving arms that was over as quickly as it had begun.
“See you later,” she said, slamming the door. Kelly could never leave a room quietly.
I stared at my deconstructed dorm room. My roommate was avoiding me, had been avoiding me since the beginning of this year. We’d had all of two conversations—one of those happened on the day we moved in, and the other happened when she found me passed out in front of the door one night after a crazy time with Kelly and Mac and a bunch of people I hadn’t seen again. As if I’d remember them anyway.
I took Kelly’s place on one of the boxes, pulling my knees up and resting my chin on them.
The fight I’d had with my mother when she’d told me that I was being forced to move back kept running through my mind. Actually, the entire Christmas break had been one long fight that didn’t seem to end.
What is wrong with you, Joscelyn? You’d better straighten up and fly right. You are coming back to Maine, or else I am coming there and dragging your ass back, understand?
Straighten up and fly right. Yeah, I’d get right on that, Mom. She was one to talk. My parents had a half-dozen marriages between them and kids and stepkids all over the place. It was a full-time job just keeping track of them.
I’d screamed myself hoarse, but hadn’t gotten anywhere. She’d even put a moratorium on hating Dad long enough to call him, fill him in and then get him to yell at me, too.
I was powerless against the two of them.
And then there was Renee.
If Mom didn’t drag my ass back, Renee would be on that. She was worse than Mom in some ways.
Speaking of my sister...
My phone rang, and when I saw who was calling, I debated about picking it up.
“Hey,” I said, wincing in anticipation of the barrage I knew was coming.
“You better be getting your stuff together and be out the door,” she said by way of a greeting.
“Nice to talk to you, too, dear sister.”
“Don’t give me that shit, Jos. I am so done with this. You’d better get your butt on the road in the next hour or—”
“I know, I know. You’ll surgically remove my fingers and sew them to my ass. I know.” Having a sister who knew surgical procedure and who was also mad at you really sucked sometimes.
“Hey, I don’t need the attitude. You’re lucky that you’re coming to be here with me instead of Mom.” She did have a point. Back at Mom’s I’d just be drowning in a sea of my step and half siblings, among them a set of four-year-old twins who made the devil look like Mother Teresa.
“I know,” I said. That seemed to be my phrase of choice lately.
“Just know that I’m going to be on your ass like white on rice, and if I’m not around someone else will do it for me. You’re walking into a house full of people that are going to watch your every move and call you out on it. Understand?”
Jesus Christ.
“Yup.”
“Okay. I’ll be waiting for you. Call me the second you leave.”
“I will. ’Bye.”
I hung up before she could say anything else. I put my hands over my face and screamed into them. This was a nightmare I never seemed to wake up from.
Asleep or awake, it never left me.
But I was awake now, and I had to move, so I got off the box and picked it up.