I Told You, Eli Oxley

Part Three, Chapter Twenty-Eight

Night was falling when I reached home, or rather, creeping slowly up the hill my house was on. I had kept my key when I left, but still wondered if I should ring, or just walk in as if it were still my home. I decided on the latter. Nobody was home.

I went into my old room. I had only been gone a few weeks, but nostalgia hit me hard in the face – I could smell it. I missed my mom's home-cooked meals. I missed my bed.

I looked around my room and took it in. I hadn't stripped it bare when I moved out, so it still had its cozy feel, much different than the cold, hard room I slept in currently.

I logged into my computer. I had left it behind because the 14:21 crew had an extra computer station for me, and because it was too much of a pain to move.

I began scrolling through my pictures folder. My albums included Random HS Pics, 18th B-Day, Family and Chattanooga Pictorial Essay where a fellow American History student and I had to drive around Chattanooga and take pictures of all the historic sites and write an essay about them. We had driven through the Chickamauga Battlefield where Union forces were squashed, went off-roading at the Brainerd Cemetery, braved the Incline Railway up Lookout Mountain to Point Park to see the memorials to the Battle Above the Clouds, which would have been a spectacular view of the valley, I had thought, but was smothered by the dense fog and clouds, which, also not lost on me, was what it must have been like when Grant's oppression broke through the Confederate artillery line at the summit.

I remembered how fun it actually all was. We had themed our project around the movie title, Dude, Where's My Car? We made sure to somehow incorporate our cars in each of the pictures. It was a good time, except the part where my car broke down and we were stranded at Craven's House. I had experienced so many emotions that evening: fear and frustration when my car wouldn't start, gratefulness at the old lady who took us in and let us use her phone (cell service was non-existent in the area), and anger when my dad told me that I needed to give up all my extracurricular activities (mainly computer hacking and designing my school's website) and "get a damn job."

***

The tension had gotten so thick in our house between my parents, I had to move out. My mom had become increasingly frustrated and burdened by having to work overtime to keep us afloat, and resentful towards my dad for putting her in that position. Even though my dad kept insisting that it wasn't his fault that his pay got cut, that it was the government that slashed the funding for the contractors he worked for, she still blamed him. Maybe there was something more to it than that, something that had been building up in her for quite a while.

Even though he had no right to, after some time, my dad began fighting back. That's when the cycle started – screaming matches between the two, followed by days of unbearable silence, eventually broken up by more screaming that led to more unresolved silence, and so on.

During a shouting and door-slamming-fest one Saturday morning, I had had enough; I knew I had to get out of there. I went for a walk, thinking about everything from my parents to Al, and Kara, who I had broken up with just two days before (which was a non-event – Kara didn't seem to care). The further away from my house I got, the more relaxed I felt. I despised living down the hall from my liar of a dad, and I hated the negative atmosphere my parents had formed. I had reached the little Baptist church two miles down the street before I realized what I had to do. The church sign read love thy neighbor even if he are not a Tennessee fan, which, don't ask me how or why, made me think of the 14:21 crew. I could move out, and maybe they would take me in.

The crew was more than happy to let me join them in their hacker house. It took a good minute, though, to convince my parents to let me go. My mom, especially. It's like she didn't want to be left alone with my dad. I did feel bad about leaving during this obvious crisis in their marriage – I didn't know how much longer they could keep fighting without tearing the whole thing down, which worried me – but I had to get out. They eventually consented, not that I needed them to, but it was preferable to leave on good terms.