Still No Title Yet. Ch I.

Tell me what you think. I'm underway with chapter II as we speak.

Or as you read.

Chapter One

Thinking of You

After another hour or two of driving into the cool late summer day, going southwest, I had to use the restroom. I pulled into the nearest rest stop and roused her brother and father.

“You two. Wake up,” I said feebly, shaking Dakota.

“Mommy…” he mumbled in his sleep. My heart sank a little more as Dakota opened his dark, evergreen eyes-the color of which I shared, and my father passed down to them. Kody shook his curled-at-the-ends black bangs back. Black hair also like mine, shiny and thick, received from our mother.

“I’m sorry,” Dakota covered, his eyes widening, realizing what he had just been mumbling. I blinked back my tears and clambered out of the car, where dad was already rushing towards the small vestibule that contained the toilets. My mind raced, even if I was just sitting down to take a pee. Driving into nothingness was almost what I was doing; nowhere I went was going to take my mind off my mother. The last I had seen her, she was running around her bedroom frantically, looking for the necklace she had taken off in order to shower-the necklace dad had bought her for Christmas. The gold necklace with a diamond heart pendant that meant as much to her as any of us did…she ended up finding it and we said our goodbyes at the airport, including as many “I love you’s” as was possible.

When everyone got back into the truck, dad going into the capacious backseat to sleep some more, and Dakota in the front with his iPod on, I revved up the engine. As we pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the freeway, Dakota asked me a question that made me think more than anything had-

“Indi?”

“What’s up, kid?”

“Where are we going?”

I breathed in deeply and focused my eyes on the dim day stretching ahead of me. “You want me to be honest?”

“Fully.”

Another sigh and I replied with, “I have no idea.”

I have another brother. His name is Montana-yes, after the state, as were all of our birth names-but he moved out long ago. Montana was eight when I was born and therefore wasn’t so close to us; in fact, he was rather distant at times, and I was ten when he graduated from high school and announced that he was leaving. He had been accepted to school a far, far away in my mind’s eye-Boston Medical School far up the east coast. The next we saw of him after that summer was one Christmas, the last Christmas before mom left for the middle east.

Montana disapproved of mom, he said, and her choice to “get herself involved in foreign affairs.” Come to think of it, growing up, Montana had held disputes with mom and dad every night I could remember. It wasn’t quite the best idea; my father, the fiery Princeton graduate lawyer, had won all but one case, spit fire at him so hard that Kody and I would say we saw burn marks all over him.

Mind you, I am no fan of the war. I never have been, I never will be, especially after mom’s death. I never argued, though; I was proud of what mom did, despite my views.

We had not seen Montana since mom’s memorial…before that, it was his wedding. He married a girl I didn’t know, with wispy blonde hair and pale skin. He met her at medical school and apparently, without our knowledge, fell in love. It was an odd thing for me, seeing him walk down that altar all but two years ago; happy, he was, serene. Montana, for the first time, got along with dad, hugged mom, and cracked jokes with Dakota and me. It was quite a phenomenon, in all truth.

But then, Montana was different all over again. At mom’s memorial, dressed in an all-black suit, left the pregnant wife at home and looked thoroughly distraught. He cried, for the first time I had seen him cry, and he cried on my shoulder and he cried on Kody’s shoulder and we cried on each other’s shoulders. Even though Montana had seemed to despise the ways my glorious mother worked, he sobbed that day.

I thought about Montana, as I drove in the silent car along the road.

Dark was creeping up into the windows and I had lost track of time. I didn’t know where, exactly, I was headed. All I knew was that we arrived at a hotel that night and I crashed right onto one of the beds, sleeping a dreamless night.

“Well, welcome to our new home.”

The door slammed shut behind me as I rolled our biggest suitcase into the new apartment in northern Washington state, two days later.

Never home, was what ran through my mind when I looked around at the blank walls. Never ever. This place was foreign; it felt as if I had walked into a different world. The walls were stark white all around, the kitchen was small, the living room even smaller, and two miraculously capacious bedrooms lining a narrow hallway. At the end of the hallway was a plain bathroom, holding two sinks and an glass-door shower.

“This isn’t home,” Dakota said, speaking my own thoughts. “Home is at least ten times bigger than this.”

“We’ll do with what we have,” dad looked older than I had ever seen him as he swung out the door and down the corridor to help the movers, who had just arrived.

“What do you think?” Kody asked me. I shrugged and he followed me into the tinier of the two rooms.

“It’s an apartment, in a shitty area, what more could we need right now?”

“A mansion in a sunny, secured place?”

“Shut up, Kody. Do you get anything that Daddy says?”

“Not really. But this is a ghetto neighborhood…”

“Ghetto, you’re just being paranoid. This is the better part of the ghetto.”

“So you admit we’re in the ghetto?”

“Dakota William, go die.” Without waiting for Dakota to retort, I led myself out of the carpeted bedroom and to help my dad with the movers.

The first day of school-for me and Dakota, at least-it was a day we felt as if we were walking to our deaths. The sun shone over the school, a solid brick building in what Dakota kept calling “the ghetto.” The gold letters above the main doors we walked into read bold and clear, “Henderson High School.” It was built up instead of out and had two parking lots; one in the back, near a football field and a soccer field, and one in the front where the juniors and seniors and teachers parked.

We hadn’t toured the school. A week after we became settled into the flat, we had placed calls and set up classes; the school had a low population of only around three-hundred students, therefore they gave any juniors or seniors with cars and licenses a parking spot. I settled my car in ten minutes before the first period was to start, a shiny icon in between a ruddy old Civic and a rustic Bug.

“You okay, kid?”

Kody gave me a sideways glance as we stepped into the surprising hustle and bustle of Henderson High. “Nope. How about you?”

“Not at all. Good luck, and don’t ask upperclassmen for directions-especially not around here. You don’t know anyone. Keep your cell phone on, my love.”

“Good luck to you too.”

Kody walked the opposite way I did, looking at his schedule with a look of veneration. I stood near a door I assumed was the main office door and watched until I saw him disappear up a staircase. Then I looked at my own paper, folded in my hand along with my mobile I’d had since a year ago. I remember all of the wishes of luck and hope my old classmates had embedded upon me the whole morning. I missed it there, things had seemed simple. But after mom died, I had had to get out.

I managed to locate my first period class without asking for directions, but instead I got a lot of odd looks from passerby; luckily, I only had to endure so much before I felt I was safe and in an old desk situated in the back of a slightly dingy looking classroom.

“You must be new?” said the teacher, the only person of the roughly seven people in the room who spoke to me. “Err, are you possibly Indiana Romano?”

“Yes.”

The teacher was very young; he had gelled back black hair, tall frame, and tanned skin. Astonishingly, his square black-rimmed glasses read a designer name on the side and he was relatively better dressed than many of the teenagers in the room. AP American History, it said down on my schedule. Mr. Montgomery.

“Hello,” Mr. Montgomery said, sticking out his hand to me and as I shook it, he placed papers down upon my desk. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve told our class a lot about you and look! There’s the rest of them.”

The announcements tapped on and I noticed they came through an obviously old fashioned intercom above the front blackboard. I stood up for the pledge and sat back down.

“Today is September 26th, 2005, welcome to another fresh new day at Henderson…”

Whoever did the announcements droned on while Mr. Montgomery leaned over my desk, pointing out different papers and trying to help me get caught up. When the announcements drawled to a stop, he patted me once on the shoulder and went back up to start class. I had his ice blue eyes stuck in my head from then on.

“Settle down, quiet, class has started. Everyone, I’d like to introduce you to Indiana Romano,” he motioned towards me and the class all shifted in their seats to stare. My face blushed redder than it ever had in the time span of my sixteen years on earth. “Where you from, Indiana?”

Stifled giggles sounded around the room. I hadn’t heard anyone giggle at my name since I was a freshman. “I’m from New Jersey, actually.”

“Anyone have questions for Indiana before we start class? Hands raised, please,” Mr. Montgomery added as the class of fifteen kids, exactly, started muttering. Where was I? In a world where juniors had to be reminded to raise their hands during class?

One Hmong girl with straight brown hair framing her round face raised her hand and, before even being called on, she turned to face me. “Where in New Jersey? Anywhere near New York City?”

“Around twenty minutes from it,” I said softly, remembering the dollhouse-like house overlooking the city skyline with a smile. “You could see the…well, all the buildings, from my attic window.”

Another boy raised has arm, waving it around and around. The boy sat kitty-corner from me and I thought he was going to have a seizure if no one picked on him quick enough, the way he was bumbling out of the seat. “What brought you to shit hole, Michigan? By the way, I’m Andrew, and I’d tap-,”

“Andrew, that’s enough,” Mr. Montgomery stopped the boy, whose name was obviously Andrew, before he could finish his sentence. “Let’s start class now.”

Throughout the class, I stared at Andrew, analyzing him over and over again; a mange of blonde hair, quite the opposite of mine in every aspect, including its stick-straight form. Bangs covered his eyes but when he tossed his head to one side, I discovered they were hazel, so hazel they almost became yellow. When he caught my own eye, I quickly moved my head and focused on the back of the African American girl ahead of me.

I got through the day with not a lot of people saying anything to me. I found Dakota to be in my lunch and I sat with him; he had had more luck than I had, and made friends, but they had a different lunch. He spilled about meeting a few pretty girls, and how they pointed out the “tough guys” to him…at least, the tough ninth graders. I told him of Andrew and he flinched a little, knowing what was running through these boy’s minds about me.

I had only had three boyfriends-one in the eighth grade for a couple of months, he was my first kiss but then we broke up. The next real boyfriend I had was in the start of my sophomore year, when a boy from a different school who wore tight pants and had dyed his hair as black as mine asked me out and we dated for roughly a month. But then came one other boy, my best friend for four years, Matt; upon finding out that I was moving as a cause of my mother’s death, however, we broke things off. It had lasted a long time-seven months at the least-and the breakup had only been about two weeks prior to leaving Jersey.

I had cried, and cried, and cried. We had kissed, and kissed, and kissed; never doing anything more, for we both took in the oath of abstinence at the time, and everyone said we were the perfect couple, and destined to win best couple for superlatives in senior year. But my tragedy had struck and with it came even more tragedy. I believe my heart is too broken to actually be there.

When I got back from school and threw myself onto my bed, exhausted, I reveled in the day. Andrew had appeared in three of my classes, casting me looks in all of them and snide remarks about Henderson and how it was as crappy as it looked. I vaguely thought of him romantically; he was definitely never the type I would go out with. Or even fall for. He seemed, in a way, sick and twisted, near heartless. But was I just judging?