Boo-Ya

1/7 : Boo- Ya

He sees the figure on the first day in the new house. The house is clean, big, it is a nondescript home with many rooms and pillars in front of the doorway. High arching windows. Clean, classically beautiful.

Another time of moving up and down, of new smells and new rooms and new faces.

Just another day in another week of summer.

He sits in the car with his head perched to the side uncomfortable. Music flares through the headphones on his neck in a stream of whispers.

For the summer, again, and a change, but what does he know, he should be glad to have the opportunity to meet new people and he should look at his brother-

It makes him feel sick. Like vertigo that settles in even if he doesn't move.

The world blurs and turns and the ideas and thoughts make him motion sick in the worst way.

That is the moment that he stares at the giant house and sees a figure.

At first, he is sure it is just someone from the moving company. Someone that cleans up, maybe. But as his thoughts blur, so do the images of the overlapping figure at the window.

And as he steps out the figure still hasn't moved and still, it MOVES, in a strange way that suggests something is inherently wrong with his head.

If his stomach wasn't eating itself he would feel sick.

If he wasn't nervous and his limbs weren't dragging, he would stumble.

He stands on the pathway and glares at the window.

The window, ironically, will turn out to be his room's window.

Not that he knows that yet. He is still quite unfamiliar with the layout.

Cal finds him perched hands on his thighs on the way to the door as he steps out of the house. His hand on his shoulder keeps Maven up when he dry heaves another breath.

"It's fine," he promises.

Not that Cal ever believes it.

He doesn't sleep at all at night. That isn't anyone's fault.

Down the hallway, his father's voice rumbles too loud.

Some stumbling, some drunken routine dragging himself anywhere.

He half expects his mother's voice. But she is still not home apparently, and so the evening crosses.

Lying awake, the banging still catches him off guard.

Its doors sliding open in creaking, screeching motions.

He hits them with his hand to keep them shut.

They slide open again.

For a while, the fight of opening and closing them is infuriating.

Then Maven just gives up and puts his headphones on again.

He doesn't see the closet doors sliding open again. Or that they wait for him to notice in a waving motion.

"My closet door is broken," he says to his mother instead the next morning.

She blankly glares at him.

It is a piece of unnecessary information.

"We will get that fixed," she still assures him.

Her hand rips at his color, pushes over his head, to make sure he doesn't look any bit as out of place as he feels.

Just as he lets it go by how her fingers always manage to rip at him to make sure everything is pinched to perfection, his vision blurs a little again. A dead spot at the corner of his right eye. He turns his head slowly.