Dark and Silent

Elsewhere...

November 21. 14:30

"So far seventeen sucks," Nic grumbled to herself as she kicked the sand on the beach and sighed. She had driven out to see the ocean for the last time in a long time. She couldn't see coming back to Charleston any time soon. Her parents had died in a car accident in August, and her seventeenth birthday in September had passed without fanfare. She had the last of her belongings from the house in Beaufort in the backseat of her old ford beater.

"Why a Ford?" Her dad had asked when she chose it.

"If you're going to have a beater it should be a fix or repair daily," had been her answer. It had made him laugh every time he looked at the escort she was certain had once been white but was now more of an indeterminate creamy gray.

As of this morning, she was officially emancipated. And as much as she appreciated the kindness of Dr. Stubbs and his wife taking her in while she got her parents' estate sorted, she was ready to leave. Her plan was to head north to her parent's property in the mountains.

Nic had been found collapsed on the sidewalk at six years old. When she woke up in the hospital she remembered very little. She had been placed with Oliver and Shelly Wright, a very nice couple who were involved with the county DCFS foster to adopt program. He was a historian and she was...well artist may have been stretching it, hippie wasn't quite right either. Nic's mom might best be described as a crafter. Now that wasn't to say that she wasn't just as intelligent as her husband, she absolutely was. In fact, she had just as many history degrees as he did. It was only that he studied military history and emigration histories and she focused on a different style of history. Oliver Wright published papers and worked in dusty archives and stared at grainy microfiche and Shelly Wright was more focused on bringing to life the day to day living of the past. She did her fair share of time in the archives, but most of what she learned was gleaned from personal journals of craftsmen. Men who throughout history had not always been literate or only if they had been, only barely so and the journals of homemakers. So she learned how to knit (very badly), crochet (very well), sew (by hand, by foot-powered machine, and by modern sewing machine), cook (good God could that woman cook) and half a dozen other handcrafts that she insisted Nic learn to do at least somewhat proficiently. Nic had both loved and hated it.

Then came "The Year". Yes. It had capitals and quotation marks even in her mind. "The Year" was when her parents had decided that they were going to join a group of other historians to live as though they were in a specific time period of a full year. Nic had been fourteen at the time and understandably less than thrilled at the idea. Three universities and a private academy had joined together to sponsor building a small living history town where they lived out the research and made discoveries (or really if you listened to her mom re-made discoveries) about what would and would not have worked living at that technological level.

All three of them had ended up enjoying living in the frontier town in the foothills. So her parents had agreed to do a second year. Although, there hadn't been many families with children her age and so the experience, while amazing, had made her even more socially awkward among her peers than she had been. Not that Nic even noticed. She had never managed to do what most people considered normal schooling.

When the adoption had finalized she was still the same traumatized six-year-old suffering from anxiety a cop had found passed out in the rain. They had attempted, like good parents to enroll her in school. Unfortunately, Nic had suffered a massive panic attack when they dropped her off and passed out within the first fifteen minutes. It had been humiliating but her parents had taken it in stride and homeschooled her while she worked through her anxiety. It had taken years but she managed to enter middle school like a normal eleven-year-old. Not that it had lasted long. While she had been homeschooling she had far outpaced the standardized learning. Her parents had indulged her curiosity and allowed her to learn about whatever interested her once she completed the prescribed homeschool lessons and had wound up graduating with her high school diploma at 16.