Chapter Text
“You think I don’t know that?” Abby yelled at her daughter. “You act like I have a choice! We don’t have the money to live in the city anymore, Clarke.”
Clarke looked at her mother, tears welling in her eyes. “You can’t make me leave! Just like that? I have one year left. One! I have friends, Mom.”
“Oh, don’t give me that bullshit,” Abby sneered. “I can’t even remember the last time I saw Niylah.”
Clarke looked at her with disgust. “Fuck you!” she yelled back and quickly turned on her heel. She ran up the stairs as tears streamed down her face.
Fuck her mom and her new job. They had lived in the city since Clarke was twelve years old. It was all she knew, and now her mother was ripping it away from her, as if her life hadn’t changed enough in the past year.
Moving all the way from New York City to some random town upstate was not only painfully inconvenient, but also, in her eyes, incredibly cruel. She had one year left of high school, and she preferred to finish it around people she grew up with — even if she didn’t talk to her friends as much as she used to.
It was apparent to everyone in her life that after the crash she was never the same. She was a shell of who she used to be. Her friends tried to be there for her — they really did — but they could only handle her anger to a certain extent.
It wasn’t that she was angry at them, per se, but rather the world. She cursed God, or whoever controlled her existence, asking why it had to be her who shattered her leg. Why she had to live with a permanent disability for the rest of her life. The stupid brace that everyone stared at — she cursed God for it. She cursed God repeatedly. She asked why it had to be her — why it had to be him.
If someone had told her a year ago that she would no longer hang out with her friends, or that her grade average would be a C, or even that she would wear sweatpants and sweatshirts to school every day instead of a real outfit, she would have told them they were lying. If someone had told her that her father would die in a car crash with her sitting in the passenger seat, she would have punched them in the face.
She thought back to the moment her life changed forever. One moment Jake and she were peacefully driving on their way to the grocery store, and the next, a Ford truck rammed directly into the driver’s side, effectively crushing her father.
The car had rolled onto its side, her head hitting the cracked passenger window. It took a few seconds to regain her bearings before she touched her head and felt the warm blood.
The whole car was crushed. When she looked down into the footwell, she noticed that the dashboard had crumpled in on itself and onto her left leg. She tried to move; she had so much adrenaline coursing through her that she barely felt any pain. She tugged on her leg with her bloodied hands, but the only thing that resulted was her pants ripping against the splintered plastic of the dashboard. In a time that felt much longer than a few seconds, she craned her neck toward her father. She wished she hadn’t.
“What the fuck!” she screamed. “Dad!”
Her father hung limp from his seat above her, the entire left side of his body crushed. Blood dripped down his face onto her. Her dad — the man who raised her — was unrecognizable.
She began screaming at the top of her lungs, thrashing against her seatbelt. Her brain was too muddled to think straight. Never in her life had she seen so much blood. She reached out to grab him, clawing at his seatbelt, trying to find some way to get him out. She wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t even unbuckled.
“Dad? Dad!” she yelled. “Wake up, Dad!”
But he wasn’t going to wake up.
She stood in her room; the walls were bare for the first time since her family moved in. It was an odd sight and made Clarke uncomfortable. She wondered what the new house would look like.
“Moving truck’s here!” her mother called from downstairs.
Clarke sighed. She picked up her suitcase full of the rest of her clothes and left her childhood room one last time.
“Coming,” she called back as she padded down the steps.
It had been a week since her mother broke the news about moving upstate. The town was called Arkadia. It was a relatively small town, but big enough that not everybody knew each other. Abby’s friend, Dr. Kane, worked at a hospital there — he was the one who put in a good word for Abby. Since the town was smaller, so were the hospitals, and Arkadia Medical Center was in need of a new Chief of Surgery, so Abby quickly took the job. It paid better than her current job, just with a little less prestige than working at New York-Presbyterian.
It was currently Friday. Abby wanted to have them moved into their new house by Saturday, and they were both starting their respective schedules on Monday — Abby with her new job, and Clarke with her new school.
To say Clarke was nervous about the fresh start was an understatement. She couldn’t have been more nervous, in all honesty. At her current high school in the city, she knew everybody, even if she didn’t really talk to them anymore. At Arkadia High School, she wouldn’t know a single person. The only comforting thing was that she had only one more year of school before she could leave that town for good and go to college.
“Help me get these boxes in the truck,” Abby said, pointing at the boxes next to the couch. “I want to get on the road as fast as possible.”
“Sure,” Clarke said, knowing her mom was already going to piss her off today.
They loaded the truck together while the U-Haul driver and his team worked on getting the heavy furniture. Clarke was quiet the whole time.
“Are you really going to be like this the whole day?” Abby asked.
“Like what? I’m doing what you told me to do.” She shrugged. “Moving the boxes.”
“You know what I mean, Clarke.” Abby looked pointedly at her. “I really can’t deal with an attitude for five hours. Buck up, please. I’m asking this one time.”
Clarke looked at her mother incredulously, like she had just told her to run fifty miles in an hour. “‘Buck up’? Seriously? How about you gain some sense and put all this shit back in the house so I can actually live my life!”
“Clarke!” Abby quietly snapped, so the movers carrying the leather couch wouldn’t hear. “Don’t disrespect me. We are leaving. Please start to come to terms with it. I know it’s hard, but it has to happen, and I need you to start acting mature about it.”
“Disrespect—” Clarke shook her head. She couldn’t believe this. Was her mother really this dense? “You know what? Fine, I’ll stop disrespecting you. Let’s just get this over with.”
Her mother nodded, and they continued packing the truck. They finished quickly, much to Abby’s satisfaction, and got on the road almost as soon as the movers left. Clarke had her headphones in while her mom listened to a podcast. She would usually sleep during such a long car ride, but she was too distracted to rest. She watched the city pass by with a melancholy feeling. She knew she had to come to terms with this move, but she couldn’t get out of her own sorrow.
Eventually the city gave way to highways, and a few hours later, highways gave way to suburbia. The first thing Clarke noticed about Arkadia was that it was pretty clean — much cleaner than the city, at least. At least that was one pro to this whole disaster: no rats the size of cats. She rolled her eyes. There were no pros to this.
Driving through her new neighborhood, she noticed it was relatively well off. The residents were probably upper-middle class. All the houses they passed were at least two stories, and many of the driveways had basketball hoops. She found it strange. Back in the city there were plenty of outdoor courts — she didn’t get how people could play on a slanted driveway.
“This is it,” Abby said.
Clarke turned her head, peering through her mother’s window, before they pulled into the driveway. It was a nice house, yellow on the outside, with a few trees. From what she could tell, there was even a fenced yard peeking into her line of sight.
And, of course, a basketball hoop on their slanted driveway.