[completed] Nova Carter knows exactly what the next few years of her life will look like: she will work harder than anyone else (as she didn't get into New York University to slack off); she'll be keeping her head down and prioritizing getting her a...
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Chapter Thirty-five | On the Train Ride Home ♫On the Train Ride Home by The Paper Kites
My family's blue beach house was never just a house. It is the smell of salt carried by the wind and the sound of waves crashing against the shore. My mother working at the kitchen table, my father's briefcase by the coat rack as if he's always on the verge of leaving.
Inevitably, it is also a storage unit. This house keeps every childhood memory I have inside of and around its walls, and all the emotions that came with those memories.
In some ways, my childhood was easy. I didn't have chores, never struggled doing my homework and had siblings that I only fought with a healthy number of times. But then there's something heavier right underneath all of it. All the times I wondered what was wrong with me, all the times I felt excluded and left out as I watched my siblings surf and play beach volleyball and get their first driving lessons and swim out into the ocean.
I was always on the sidelines, but I never knew what I did wrong to not be allowed to do the same things (at the time, I equated not being able to do something as not being allowed to, because I couldn't grasp the concept of a disability yet).
How unfair. Children shouldn't have to struggle with things they're too young to even understand.
I look at the time. It's ten on a Tuesday. My mom's working in the kitchen and my father left for work two hours ago. I think I forgot that I'm no longer a child when I returned yesterday. I expected my Mom to dote over me, I expected my bedroom to feel the way it used to. Instead, I'm just as bored and alone as I was back in New York.
I wander out onto the back porch, then slowly descend the stairs to approach the shed out back. Dad forgot to pull the key out of the door again, so I'm able to grasp the bulky metal and twist it until the door opens and the dusty lightbulb dangling overhead clicks on.
My childhood is in this shed, too. The tricycle I used to ride when I was eight peeks out from underneath a torn sail, right in between Flynn's red mountainbike and Sofia's white garden tools. She had a children's set: shovels and pruning shears, buckets with dandelions painted on them, a rake, and loppers. There's even a half-deflated skippy ball in the back, right by the jumping ropes and buckets of broken street chalk.
My parents' bikes are missing. I turn and see them leaned against our picket fence, in the tall grass that my Dad can never reach with the lawn mower. Mom's key is still in hers. Before I can really think it through, I lock the shed, throw the key back into the house, and take Mom's bike out into the deserted street. Then, I go, not quite sure where.
The cold doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I pedal out of our street and try to revisit the routes I used to take when I was young, past all of Addenfield's not-so-famous landmarks: the corner store, the town square, the library, until I find myself in front of the rehabilitation center.
