Everything in Between

Chapter One

Just so no one is confused, the beginning of this story takes place in 2013.

Chapter One:

It was about 11:30 at night and I could hear the voices of my Aunt Mary and my Uncle Carter fighting out in the hallway drifting into my room. They were most likely fighting over me; trying to figure out if they should keep me, leave me, or maybe even send me off to some other distant relative that I didn't even know I had. These were all pretty valid possibilities in my head, and now with Pat gone any one of them were bound to happen.

Pat was gone. That thought kept swirling around in my head like some sort of foreign language that I had never even heard of. His funeral was today and even though I was there and went to the burial, it still all felt so surreal. In my head I kept thinking that Pat was just out with his friends, or in his room next door to mine - not buried in West Central Cemetery and Memorial Park. Pat was the only family that I had left and with him gone, it was just me.

See, when I was about nine years old, and when Pat was twelve, our parents got into a pretty nasty car accident coming home from my dad's work Christmas party. Now when my parents died, they were only in the process of writing their will, so what was to happen to Pat and I was pretty unclear. With the best interest of us in mind the judge wanted to keep me and my brother together, choosing against putting us into foster care. The next best thing was our mom's sister, Mary. Her step-sister, that is.

Aunt Mary and Uncle Carter seemed pretty welcoming at first, but they already had a daughter my age named Ashlyn, and they weren't exactly looking for another one. They didn't have a son though, and Pat seemed like the perfect solution to take up the role. They took both of us in, we were a package deal, and ever since then Pat and Ashlyn were treated with praise and glory while I was left behind in the dust.

But sadly life goes on.

Flash forward about nine years and you get to where we are now. School was pretty much over, I was surviving all the graduation crap that every senior goes through, and it was coming up to my 18th birthday in August, just four months away. I was pretty happy considering I only had a few months left here in this God forsaken house and things were actually looking pretty decent for once. I may've not had a lot of friends, no friends really, but Pat sometimes let me hang out with him and his best friend Jesse, so things weren't too bad. If I wasn't with them, then I was at West Central visiting my parents, something that I did often. However, I should've realized sooner that you lose the moon while counting the stars.

About a week ago we got a phone call in the middle of the night. It was a police officer and he told us all about how somebody reported a car accident on the corner of Fourth and Miller Street. A drunk driver sped straight through the stop sign and T-boned a black Chevy pick-up truck. Pat's truck. Just like my parents, he died on impact and there was nothing they could've done to save him. It was his 21st birthday.

The arguing in the hallway had died down a bit, but I knew it was just a matter of time before my Uncle came in telling me that I was going to be sent to Great Aunt Edna's . . . whoever she was. Maybe it would be Great Aunt Myrt instead. That sounded like torture just waiting to happen. But no matter what happened, or who I got sent to, there really only seemed to be one clear solution to all of this; I had to run away. I'd been thinking it over these past few days and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I knew I only had a few months left before I could leave for college, but I also knew for a fact that I wouldn't be able to last here without Pat.

With that thought, I silently climbed out of bed, getting dressed as quickly, and quietly, as I could, grabbing my backpack in the process, and putting my plan into motion.