Discovering Ryder Hadley

A/N:

So. Here it is. This title took me about a million years and I don't even like it that much, but whatever?

This is inspired by an idea I got while reading To Kill A Mockingbird, so the very, very general idea does belong to Harper Lee.

And I didn't realize until just now that Hadley rhymes with Radley. Oh no. We'll just call it an homage to Lee and be done with it.

Anyway, first chapter, here you go, have fun, kids. Tell me how you like it. :)

 

 

 

I cut the tag off one last pair of shorts and stuffed them into my suitcase as quickly as I could without wrinkling them. As expected, I was not in possession of any “summer clothes,” as my grandma called them- I live in northern Minnesota, where summers rarely top seventy degrees- so we’d had to go buy all new. I did have a few skirts, which I wore with leggings, usually, and some dresses. I packed them all, along with lots of t-shirts.

I was going to Alabama to my grandma’s house in Whitney, Alabama for the summer for some “family time.” As you can guess, I wasn’t spectacularly happy about it. It’s not that I don’t love my family and enjoy seeing them- I most definitely do. It’s just that we’re so different. My mom and dad split up when I was a baby. My mom, a native Canadian, had agreed to move down south with him- way down south. But when they’d divorced, she’d moved back up north, where she was more comfortable. My grandparents on her side still lived in Canada, so we went to see them often.

On my dad’s side, though, most of my family lived in southern USA. The few times I’d gotten to see them- Christmas and my birthday every year- they had come up to see me. And I did love them, and I did love seeing them, but they were almost alien to me. The way they spoke, the politeness that my mother called “natural southern hospitality.” It was all so odd to me. But I was curious. I was ready to take on a summer at my grandma’s, even if I was hospitalized for heat stress.

I went to the kitchen again to put the scissors away and throw the tags from my new articles of clothing in the trash. I pulled a water bottle from the fridge and downed about a half of it as I heard my mother enter the room. Replacing the water bottle in its spot in the fridge door, I turned and watched her as she unzipped my suitcase and took out a few things on the top, the things that I’d just put in, and refolded them. I smiled weakly- normally I would be upset with her for doubting me,

(Eva May you’re not doing those dishes the right way here let me help you I know what I’m doing I’ve been doing it for years you’ll never learn it the right way if you don’t let me show you now)

but I knew it was just her way of coping with the fact that I was leaving for an entire summer. I knew she was just worried about me being gone for so long. I noticed she’d gotten the zipper stuck and I went over to help her finish up.

She turned to me with a smile on her face, one which I knew with a sad certainty was completely fake. She looked up at me and patted my cheek, took my upper arms in her hands and squeezed tight.

“You sure you wanna go?”

I grinned. “Yeah, mom, I’m sure.”

“The whole summer?”

“The whole summer.”

She sighed and looked down. I felt the familiar sting of tears in my eyes and told myself to stop being a little bitch- especially in front of my own mother.