The Sweet Taste of Honey

PERFECT MEMORY

AVERY

Big cities and small villages though evidently different in atmosphere really aren't all that sparse of similarities. You can be just as lonely around sixty thousand people as you can be around a thousand and that I was. Lonely.

I had just moved from Boston to a small village in the middle of nowhere. Meadowside Village, somewhere my mother had called home before she'd left the old brick walls and cobble streets to live with my dad.

The three of us were happy in our city view apartment and then one day not so long ago, conveniently just before Christmas, I caught my dad doing less than decent things with my English teacher.

One awkward Christmas dinner, two days, and a last-minute flight to my mother's childhood home, which had been left to her after my grandparents had passed, and I was due to start a new school in a new place, a small school at that. January sixth, four hundred pupils, a fresh start.

We'd been here a little while, a day or so, and I had made no effort to unpack or start my life here.

"Avie, will you unpack these boxes?" My mother asked in a tone that told me she wasn't asking, more so telling.

"Later," I sighed as I stared at my phone screen waiting for a message from my friends or at least my father wishing me good luck in my new school. Nothing.

"Now Avery," she warned with my full name as she lent on the side of my doorway.

"I know that keeping busy stops you thinking about dad fucking Miss Harrison, but I have no interest in running around my room rushing to unpack. That image is burnt in my head regardless of what I do," I rolled my eyes.

"Avery!" she scolded.

"I'm sorry."

She sat beside me on the bed in a room I was now supposed to call mine "I know this hurts you as much as it hurts me, but we had to move."

"Halfway across the country?"

"It may not be ideal but it's nice here, you'll like it I promise you," she pursed her lips together as she forced a smile. I shrugged.

"Just unpack some of the boxes, please?"

How was I supposed to make a room that wasn't mine feel like home? It had once belonged to my mother's sister and pastel pink just wasn't quite to my taste. I frowned as I looked around the room.

"If you promise to give it your best shot here you can redecorate the room as part of your birthday present. Just under two months, if you can keep up your grades and make an effort to settle in you can do whatever you like with the room," she compromised.

"Paint, that's my birthday gift?" I questioned.

"Just a small part of what I have planned. Now, I'm heading to the store to stock up the kitchen make a start on the smaller boxes."

I nodded my head, "okay."

"You've got a week before you start school you should go out and make friends at some point as well."

I nodded my head again, "okay."

Repeating my senior year sucked enough when I was at home and my friends were at college, but I still managed to make some new friends and now I had to do that all over again.

I did, surprisingly, do what my mother had asked and slowly but surely unpacked the brown cardboard boxes. The room still felt foreign even with my things in it which somehow only made me miss home, my real home, more.