A Small Town Near the Great Lakes

I live in a small town near the Great Lakes where nothing ever happens. I follow the same routine everyday. At 6 o’clock every morning, my aluminum alarm clock rings eerily, forcing my mind to wake up. I’m always out of bed and in the shower by 6:10, and out of the shower, eating breakfast by 6:40. The bus picks me up at a random spot near my house everyday between 6:50 and 7. I reach the school at approximately 7:15 and immediately rush to the library to finish homework, which I almost always finish before the warning bell. Then I go to my classes. AP Statistics is first, followed by keyboarding, English, and government, after which I run off to the cafeteria to eat and finish the homework I didn’t before first hour. Then I attend my other classes: AP biology, French, and an extremely pointless technology course. I catch the city bus to a community college 30 minutes away at exactly 3:45 to make it to my 4:30 writing class (Mondays and Wednesdays) or to my Algebra class (Tuesdays and Thursdays) or to my sculpting class (Fridays). After doing whatever for a couple of hours, I speed off to the bus stop to catch a bus back to the school where my mother picks me up around 7. When we get home, we eat a nice little meal, just the four of us (my mom, my dad, my sister, and me). Then I do a few hours worth of homework and go to sleep.

This cycle repeats, Monday through Friday. On the weekends there is some variation, of course. For one thing, no school. Instead I spend the entire day doing homework, or watching intense TV shows with my sister, or completing a lengthy list of chores, or, usually, all of the above. As you can see, I lead a busy life. I’m trying to graduate a semester early. I have very little time for family, entertainment, and frankly anything besides schoolwork. Absolutely no time for friends. Luckily, I’ve never really had to worry about the friend thing. The last friend I had ditched me in second grade and hasn’t so much as glanced at me since.

I really don’t mind. In a semester and a half I’ll be free, I tell myself. Obviously I’ll have new obligations, like a job and college, but I won’t have to stay in this town where nothing ever happens. Who knows, I could find a friend probably just about anywhere other than here.Here, there are people whose parents are janitors, and no one wants to be friends with them. It doesn’t matter much to me, but it does to my sister. She keeps begging me to stay here until she graduates. I’m not sure what I’ll do. I could go to the community college for my pre-reqs. My sister will graduate a couple of years after the rest of my class, but I’ll be done with my pre-reqs a year before she does. I suppose I’ll stay until then. She can handle her senior year without me.

My schedule is pretty bland right now, quite fitting for the child of two janitors, but in time I will find happiness. After all, this schedule is the fastest way for that time to come. I was unprepared for any changes the world might make to my routine, but apparently fate had determined that change would come. When it finally did, it wasn’t the happy change that I hoped for, but something dark and disastrous. It did ultimately bring happiness, but it was many years before I noticed the connection.

It was a Wednesday, the first day my mother failed to pick me up from school. I waited for more than an hour for her to show up. At first I thought she was just late, but after an hour I knew that something had got to be wrong. She had never been more than ten minutes late, and that was only once, when she had forgotten to take a casserole out of the oven and had had to turn back to do so.

I was just about to start walking when I heard a blaring siren and a police car pulled up to the school and stopped in front of me. The officer driving the car rolled down the window and told me that he was taking me to the police station because they had a few questions for me. He said my parents were there too. Bewildered, I climbed into the car and rode to the station in silence. I wanted to ask questions, but I was kind of afraid. Something in my head half convinced me that I didn’t want to know the answers. Whether I wanted to know or not, I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

My mother and sister were waiting for me just inside the station. Both of them looked like they’d been hit by a truck, not literally. As soon as she saw me, my sister opened her mouth to speak and began to sob. Her hands came up and her face met them halfway. I walked over to comfort her, almost crying myself before I even knew why.

“Oh, Jane,” she whispered as she cried into her hands, “It’s all my fault.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked gently, “What’s your fault?”

She looked up at me with tears still sparkling in her eyes and running down her cheeks. “They think dad killed Hailey Riddle.”