The Last Goodbye

Chapter 2

I wake up with a gun to my head.

Or, at least, that's what it feels like. The first day of school is always stressful, but it's especially terrifying when you move from New York to a small, wealthy, awful town in Connecticut. True, it's not that small, but it feels small. I walked into my house for the first time and felt right at home. Not. My entire life I've lived in an apartment on the upper West Side, and then I suddenly moved to a house? With an actual yard? And real snow? No. Not happening.

I say that, but it actually did happen and it was not a dream, unfortunately. After Lacey's death, my parents decided to move what felt like 32948506.9385058 miles away from where we've spent our entire lives. They said it was to get a new environment, but I knew it was a way to escape from the reality that I had a dead sister, and that they had a dead daughter.

My mom grew up in West Hartford. She apparently knew the place backwards and forwards. (We later figured out that wasn't true after she got lost driving me to orientation yesterday. My school is about 500 steps from our house.)

The town is nice and all. It's got a cute little square with shops and a few parks but really that's all it is. And a lot of schools. Almost too many schools. It's a great school system apparently, one of the best in the country, but, of course, I would be going to private school.

Garnet Hills College Preparatory School was honestly just what you'd expect from a private school with rich white kids. It's nice, but nothing fancy. It has 10 tennis courts though. It's a little overwhelming, honestly.

My school in New York was private, sure, but nothing like this. New York City is nothing if not cramped, so we were confined to a stuffy brick building.

But Garnet Hills? It's nice. According to the kids in my homeroom it is one of the smallest schools in New England, but I easily got lost the first day. 7 buildings with almost all of them looking exactly the same leads for some easy confusion.

The schedule is weird. Like, really weird. It's set up over 10 days, with 5 classes a day but 8 total classes. They're arranged with letters, not numbers, and every day in the two week rotation has a different arrangement of the letters. I take a picture of the schedule and set it as my lock screen. I know I'm going to need it eventually.

I was told by my advisor that I have math first, because it's a day 7. Whatever the hell that means. I don't even know how to get to math, there are so many freaking buildings at this school.

See, I really like math. I never let my nerdy side through, but I really really really love math. At my old school, I was taking AP stats. They don't allow that as a junior at my school, so I'm retaking calculus this year which is okay.

What I really like about math is the satisfaction of getting an answer right. When it comes to things like talking to people and dancing or something, there's no real way to tell if something is correct or not. The way you dance could be different than the way someone else dances to the exact same song. But when you're doing math, there's always a correct answer.

I always wonder if putting my sister on chemotherapy was the right decision on my parents' part. We knew Lacey was going to die at one time or another, it was just a matter of a year, or a few months.

Chemotherapy is a really hard treatment. Patients lose their hair, either gain or lose weight, are constantly sick, and in severe cases, can't leave the hospital. At all.

I just wonder if Lacey would have been happier at home, or at school, y'know? If she could be with her friends and family, the people she loved the most, at the hardest time in her life. A lot of her friends didn't even get to say goodbye. It had been so hard staying away from everyone.