Live Love and Niall Horan

Chapter One

LIVE LOVE AND NIALL HORAN
Chapter One 

Trying to jam your belongings into a suitcase is hard work. It's even harder if you need enough supplies for a year away from home. Which is how I ended up sitting on my purple Coach luggage while trying to zip it shut on a sunny May early morning, when quite really, I should be outside. Enjoying the fresh air. Being excited that summer is coming. Chilling with friends. Not packing like I'll never be back. If never means a year.

My home is the heart of New York City, thank you very much. not wherever my mother is trying to ship me off to. I'm not even sure if she's decided on a place yet, and today is the day she's leaving to Tokyo for a year. Who transfers somebody to Tokyo? And for an entire YEAR? I've written numerous complaint letters to my mother's work over the past few months. Not that it's done much of anything to help my situation. You'd think, at 17, I can stay home alone. But, no. Because it's still one year until I turn 18.  And that's still too much for my mother to handle.

If my father was still here, none of this would've happened. I could stay home and be normal and live in the room with the dark wooden floors and the zebra wallpaper. The one I call mine. But now eveything's packed away. The walls are bare, the posters are gone,  My bed is made, but some pillows are gone and stuffed in my bag for the flight. My closest is pretty bare, although that might've been the hardest part. Picking out which clothes to take and which to leave. 

So I it in the middle of the floor of my now unrecognizable room. It's not lived in anymore. Is it even mine? I doubt it. By the time I come back, it will look the exact same. The housekeepers will clean out the dust, tidy up what I haven't tidied already. Then, there's a tentative knock at the door.

"Come in," I called, even though I know who it is and don't feel like talking.

"I see you're all packed, dear," my mother gives me a small smile. She looks nervous, just like she has all these past months. Ever since the Tokyo news came.

"Finally found somewhere to ditch me for the next year?" I grumped, zipping up the last of my luggage. 

"Sweetie, you know it's not like that..." she looks so sad for a moment a feel guilty. But almost instantly, the guilt disappears because her regular poker face is back. "I called an old high school friend. Her... son... is living in England with his 4... friends... nearby. It's very safe there."

"Great," I rolled my eyes. "And how old is this 'son' of hers?"

"18," my mother responds.

"Then why am I staying with him!?" I can't control my anger anymore. "I'm only one year younger than that you know! I'm not a child!"

"It's for your own safety," she replies matter of factly. "Norman has a cab waiting for you outside to go to the airport."

And with that, she's out the door and out my life for the next year. Our relationship has never been tight, but what we had definitely fell to pieces after she told me about Tokyo. A lot of people say I take after her and that I'll look like her when I grow up. I don't think I want to. Not that she's ugly or anything, she's prettier than most moms, but her expression is engraved in stone or something, because it hardly changes. Except for the wavy blonde hair and blue eyes, we're nothing alike.