Seventeen

Chapter 1

I head upstairs to my bedroom when I'm done eating my breakfast, chocolate chip pancakes and a smoothie. I'm not too fond of pancakes, but my mom was nice enough to make them this morning so I just went with it. I slumped down onto my bed and grab my phone off my nightstand. I check my phone calendar and realize that Moving Day is in 4 days. I'm nervous. Moving Day isn't your regular day. It isn't just a normal moving day you have with your family (when you move from one house to another). In my society, "Moving Day" is when each seventeen year old moves out of their house and gets transferred into a new city to live in. We don't know what city we go into. They don't tell us that. But I do know that when you're put into the city, you have no typical life. There's nobody over seventeen, nobody younger than seventeen. There isn't any school either. They give you testings. Testing goes on for six months. After testing, well, I don't know what's beyond that. Nobody ever speaks of it.

It's 6:23pm, my mom calls me and my brother down for dinner. "EMMA, JASPER!!! TIME FOR DINNER!" She yells tremendously. My brother, Jasper, is sixteen. He's a year younger than me. He'll have to go through the whole Moving Day thing next year. Except, I'm more nervous for him to move out than I am for me. He doesn't look anywhere ready for moving out. He's lazy, not at all smart (with school and the real world) and he simply cannot even do his own laundry.

For dinner my mom cooked us some fried chicken with baked potatoes. I didn't talk much through dinner because I didn't have much to say. My parents just kept blabbing on about my Jasper's bad mark on his report card this semester. 52% in English class was just not acceptable for them, as they'd say. "But for the record, my teacher was annoying and terrible at teaching. The class average was only 68% anyways." Jasper says trying to defend his own score. Then my dad starts talking about how Jasper has not been improving since the first day of high school (which by the way was 3 years ago) and that since next year he would be a senior, he'd have to step up his game and bump up all his scores to atleast 65%.