The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

1.The Move

The Move

"Raven!!!!! Come on sweetie. We have to go. We have a long drive ahead of us." Adora shouts upstairs to me.

Adora is my mother. Not biologically, but she's been a mother to me for as long as I can remember.

I groan into my pillow and pull the cover higher over my head.

Adora slams the door to my room open. "Raven Adrianna Somers, if you don't get your lazy ass out of bed right now I will go downstairs, get a bucket of water, come back up here and dump every drop of it on you."

"Mom " I groan getting up. "This is an air mattress. The movers took my bed already. I wish it was my bed. It would be a lot more comfortable. " I smile a her.

"Haha. Very funny. Now shower and get dressed. It's almost 3:00."

It can't be 3:00. The sun's not even up. Unless she means.... 3:00 in the morning.

"uggghhh mom. You couldn't have picked a decent hour for us to move?"

"Sweetheart if we leave in thirty minutes, we should be able to get there by five this evening 5:30 at the latest."

I groan again.

"Get up! You can sleep in the car."

"Fine." I mumble walking to the bathroom.

I shower and take care of all my bathroom needs before heading downstairs.

Downstairs, I see my mom looking around the house probably remembering. We've had some good times and we've had some bad times in this house.

We've lived here for about 5 years and at first, I hated it. But over time, I grew to love this old house. I loved everything about it. The porch outside with it's three crooked steps. Even it's peeling gray paint on the outside. The squeaky shutters used to annoy me but I've gotten used to falling asleep to the sound of them.

And then there's the bad times. Like the time me and my mom came home and found my "dad" in bed with his boss's daughter. Or should I say on the couch with his boss's daughter.  When he saw us he said the thing most guys say in this situation "I can explain. It's not what it looks like." Mom laughed and told him to get out. The next day divorce papers were delivered to the house. Mom happily signed them. And when she call the asshole to come over so he could sign them, he used every excuse in the book, but to no avail. In the end, he signed the papers and mom slammed the door behind him.

I later found out that before he and mom were married, they signed a prenup stating that if one of them were to cheat, then the other would get a very large sum of cash plus alimony. Mom also inherited a shitload of money from her grandmother. Making her a very wealthy woman.

So six months later, Mom decided that she wanted to start over. She sold the house within a month and bought another in a little town called Sleepy Hollow halfway across the country. And that's where we're moving to at this god awful hour.

Mom notices me standing on the stairs and quickly blinks back tears that were threatening to spill. She really did love dad. And over time, she had noticed him starting to pull away from her. She tried to work it out and she thought that they had succeeded but we came home that day and she was broken. She wanted to be strong for me but I knew exactly how much he hurt her. I would hear her crying every night and one night when I couldn't sleep, I came downstairs to get a glass of milk and found her sitting in front of the fireplace with a pile of shredded photos. She wasn't crying. She was just sitting there. I knew what she wanted to do with the shreds so I did it for her. I threw every piece of shredded photo into the fire then grabbed Mom's hand and led her upstairs. I didn't wanna leave her alone and I knew that she needed me so we slept in the guest room. Mom refused to go anywhere near her and Francis' room at the time but after he got all his crap, she didn't hesitate to go in and change everything. It was never to her satisfaction though. That's probably another reason why we're moving.