And Then We Fell Apart (18+)

chapter 1

It's summer 2004 when my life is flipped upside down. Completely and irrevocably, and all without my permission.

No one has ever actually asked for my permission to do anything considering I'm only fifteen.

I'm at the wonderful age where nobody takes me seriously, no one can seem to hear a word I'm saying, and all of my actions are solely driven by rampant hormones according to every adult around me.

This includes my mom, who has been silently driving for the last two and a half hours along a fairly empty highway on this sunny Friday afternoon in June.

My Walkman headphones I got for my thirteenth birthday sit against my ears, the summer mix I burned onto a CD blasting through my eardrums. Speaking of my ears, my left headphone starts to hurt from the piece of styrofoam that fell off last summer when I let my best friend, Jocelyn, borrow them. Now, the piece of purple plastic uncomfortably rests on my skin, so I have to readjust them every couple of minutes.

I ask my mom for an iPod Mini for Christmas this year to replace this old portable CD player. Jocelyn has one and it's pink. It can play any song from any artist, as long as you pay $.99 for it on iTunes. I give my mom the entire spiel on an almost weekly basis, telling her that my Walkman is starting to hurt my ears and scratch all of my discs. She tells me she'll think about it, but I don't think she will.

She's been in another world since my dad left her for her own cousin earlier this year.

I know I'm only fifteen and while everyone loves to point out how naive and clueless I am, I know she's hurting. I can see it in her once warm eyes that are now replaced with cold rigidity. She's almost unrecognizable from who she once was. It's a tale as old as time: hormonal and selfish teenage girl with a mother who can't give her the attention she craves because she's distracted by her own heartbreak. A wedge has been driven between us, but I don't take it personally. She seems to be far away from everyone these days.

And this is why we're driving.

We're leaving my childhood home where I learned to walk, talk, color, write, sing, and dance to somewhere completely new. Only, I don't want to leave what I have. Everything I'm leaving is, well, everything. It's all I've ever known, and now I have to act like it never existed.

With the money she acquired from my grandfather's passing and her job as a third grade music teacher, she bought a home for the two of us in Lewes, Delaware. It's over 200 miles away from our old home in Summit, New Jersey, which is 200 miles farther from where I want to be.

Despite my father's failures to remain faithful to my mom, my relationship with him is complicated. I'm angry with him for hurting her like this, and I'm even angrier that he left me too. He was one of my best friends, and he threw it all away for Brissa, my mom's cousin. I don't get what he sees in her.

She's ten years younger than my mom, so I guess maybe it's her tits that are an inch or two higher since gravity hasn't claimed her as its next victim. But time will get her and I hope it gets her good. I tell my mom that karma will give her jowls and hair loss. It's one of the few times I see her smile.

My mom's emotion isn't just from him cheating on her and abandoning us, but it's also to mourn the loss of two people she knew and trusted. I could never imagine going through a loss like this, even though I'm the second most-affected. She loved him with her whole heart for twenty years through high school, college, and even through her career as a successful musician. Even when she wrote the music for the Halloween movie franchise at just eighteen— you know the one. Whenever Michael Meyers stalked the main character, Laurie Strode, that infamous piano music plays over, and over, and over. The writers even used her last name as the main character's. Strode. Except, this wasn't her last name. It was her husband's, my dad's. Which now only serves as a stab to the side any time someone mentions the connection.