me, texas, and the popular boy

chapter 1

I'd never foreseen my parents getting a divorce. I probably should have. They hadn't lived in the same house since I was eleven. That's five years. It's like they were already divorced. The real shocker was when my parents sat me down at our kitchen table and told me I'd be moving in with my father. I'd be moving to Texas suburbia. Even thinking about it made me gag. I'd live in Boston my entire life - well basically my entire life, we had a brief stint in Maine in my middle school years. And I looked like I was from New England. Dark hair, dark eyes, light skin, and freckles that made my skin look paper white comparatively. Fall is the season of my dreams. And I imagined a Texas girl to be the opposite of me. Blonde hair, and already pledged to a sorority by the age of twelve. Trading in Birkenstocks for Zara sandals - that was never going to happen. Harsh winters build character, and I wanted all the character I could get.

I begged and I pleaded, I even went as far as to ask to be emancipated. That seemed to offend my mother more than help my cause. My father had flown back to Houston, where he would be picking me up from the airport in four short days. I was to stay long enough in Boston to "get my affairs in order" according to my mother. But I packed quite quickly. I had just gotten back from an end of summer weekend with my friends, so I was already partially packed. My room looked shallow. At the surface it looked neglected, as though nothing of importance occurred there. But looking closer you could see the plastered-over hole in the wall from when we decided to play baseball inside my room. A park appeared two block over a few months later. You could see the height chart that marked me up to my current 5'10 at age twelve. But in that same chart you could see that at age nine I began only allowing my parents to call me Margaret - to everyone else I was then on known as my middle name, "Skipper" or "Skip."

The night before I left I stayed out till 3 in the morning with my friends. My mother was appalled I had stayed out so late, but she was no person to try and correct my moral compass. I was able to catch a quick cat nap and I was off to the airport. I was traveling as a real passenger for the first time - no longer an unaccompanied minor. My friend Grant had told me this story of his grandmother's contact breaking due to the airplane cabin pressure. He said it was stuck in her eye and she had to get surgery to get it out. A completely fake story. And I pointed it out as soon as I heard it, using proof that one of his grandmothers lived with him and I had neve ever seen her wear glasses, and the other had died in Nazi Germany. But it's still a superstition. So my contacts were out and my silver wire frame glasses were on. And I was off to Texas, the only word that had ever made me shudder.

The airport experience was average, a TSA agent yelled at me for going through the wrong metal detector. But it was mainly just the usual. I'd stupidly put my wallet in my checked bag. So I ended up with only the ten dollars I had left from working the tickets at a folk festival, which in an airport gets you about two M&Ms. So I decided to wait to spend it until I got to O'Hare - where my layover occurred. I slept on my first flight, but I hate a middle aisle seat so there was really nothing else to do. When I got to O'Hare I decided to buy french fries with ketchup. It was $7. That's a ridiculous amount.

I had about an hour until my next flight, so I decided to waste my time by looking through some stuff my father had left me about the area and my new school. And it sounded like Riverdale. Not from the show, but from the original Archie Comics. A perfect American picture. I thought about my ex-boyfriend, he was an exchange student from France, how he had expected America to look like this. White picket fences and big oak trees. The town was called Sunfall. I googled the town on my laptop. The school appeared to be called Sunfall High School. Until I looked again and saw that there was West Sunfall and East Sunfall. Which just complicated things for me more. Even though they seemed to be exactly the same. Rival football teams...both competitive in academics...equal size... blah blah blah. Nothing other than ordinary. I would be unhappy, and I had come to terms with it. I had a window seat on this flight, and watching the metropolitan area of Chicago turn into cows and wheat fields was almost symbolic.