The Forbidden

Prologue

"Giana! Time to go!" The doorman, Eric, says through the door.

To grandmother's house I go. I think to myself, and I shake my head as I grab the handles to my duffels.
Walking down the hall to the elevator with Eric, we stand in silence as I press the button for the ground floor. As soon as the elevator dings, we step out, and I drop my bags on the ground, embracing Eric in a hug.

"Bye, Eric," I say as the cab driver honks the horn, and I grab my bags.

Opening the trunk, I shove both the bags inside and slam it shut when they're secured. Climbing in the backseat, I wave at Eric as I set my backpack on the seat beside me.

"LaGuardia Airport, please," I say, and look out the window of the taxi as we leave Albany, New York and make the drive to LaGuardia Airport in Queens.
Watching as the buildings of the city pass through the window, my heart sinks every second I get farther from my home, where I grew up.

My father travels for his marketing career, constantly being drafted around the country to make pitches for new companies, and sometimes he even gets called to countries like Japan. As a lawyer, my mom, isn't home much either. She takes cases from just about everywhere. She's in such high demand that she usually has less than a day before being called in to consult on a case.

Needless to say, my mom and dad aren't very present in my life, nor have they ever been. I've always been raised by my nanny, or my best friend Hailey's mom. They're the closest things I have ever had to parents.
So that's why I'm being flown to the town of Apache, Oklahoma to live with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle.

Supposedly, my mom was raised there, but I find that hard to believe. With her standards and her high class attitude, it's difficult to absorb the fact that she could've been raised anywhere other than a high quality town with rich people and good schooling.
However, my father was born and raised in southern Florida.

That's how he and my mother met. She was traveling there on her first ever consult and my father was there in the same building selling a pitch to the company's owner as they were going through a lawsuit and needed to change their slogan to prevent further crisis with the law. After my parents met, and four years later, I came along.

My mother never took me to see my grandparents, or my aunt and uncle. So this will be the first time I meet any of them. I don't even know if I have cousins. I hope I have some around my age;  maybe that would help me fit in more. Often, my father and mother brought me to Florida to visit my father's parents, but my mother was gone with the wind right after high school, and she hasn't been home to see her parents since.

It'll never be like that for me, since I won't have a home to go back to. My parents will probably put off retirement for twenty three more years until they reach 83 and then finally stop working when they're sick of it. As if... they'll probably die at their desks from working themselves to the point of exhaustion.
After seeing how much it would be for the Albany Airport, my parents decided on one in Queens two and a half hours away because they didn't want me getting lost in the large airport of Albany.

But they'll send me alone anyway... my parents confuse me. So, so much.

After we reach the airport, I hand the driver two crisp hundred dollar bills and a fifty as well. Stepping out of the cab, I grab my duffels and sling them over my shoulders, closing the trunk and watching the taxi drive off, leaving me alone.

Walking into the airport, I take out my ticket and flight information and hold it in my hand as I walk to gate 23. After turning in my ticket stub, I sit in the airport and fiddle with my arrow necklace that I had received for a birthday two years ago from Hailey's mom. Hailey has only been my friend since the eighth grade when I moved from Hartford to Albany.