Page 13 of Reaching Avery
Chapter Four
Avery
There was something calming about trains. I wasn’t sure why. For as long as I could remember, I’d been fascinated by them: how they could go from one place to another so fast, the wailing of their horn—a drawn-out sound that pierced the air and echoed for miles.
Sometimes, I’d even imagine hopping on one and just letting it take me anywhere. Anywhere but where I was.
As I sat on the front porch, I listened to the train as it moved down the railroad tracks near my home. The sun had already set, and it was late into the night. I should’ve been in bed since I had school the next morning, but I couldn’t sleep.
Too much was on my mind.
That first week at school had gone all right. Nothing too crazy or awful had happened. Yet. I hadn’t made any friends, but that wasn’t exactly a surprise. My attitude hadn’t helped matters any. The one guy who’d tried talking to me? I’d been a jerk to him. In my head, it had been for good reason, but I felt bad about it. A little.
The end of August air was nice, and I wished summer could stay forever. Fall was okay, but it just meant winter was around the corner, and I hated the cold.
There’d been too many nights where I’d laid awake shivering because the temperature had plummeted, and our heater had been broken. Or sometimes our electricity had been shut off. On those nights, Declan and I’d slept side by side to try to stay warm.
Headlights glared across my vision, and I looked to see Mom’s car pull into the driveway.
It was an old clunker that she’d paid a wad of cash for. The engine overheated sometimes, and the shocks were shot to crap, but at least it ran—most of the time—and got her from one place to the other. I hated her taking the bus to and from work, especially when she was dressed the way she had to be.
“Sweetie, what are you doing up?” she asked after getting out of the car and walking toward the porch.
She barely had any clothes on, and she pulled her long coat around her to cover what she could. It was too warm for a coat, but she always used it when coming home from work on nights where she didn’t have a change of clothes.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, standing up once she was beside me and giving her a hug. She smelled like cigarettes and cheap perfume. “How was work?”
Yeah, it was a stupid question, but I asked it nonetheless.
“Not too bad,” she answered, giving me a sad look. She hated her job and often said she was sorry, and I’d tell her she had nothing to apologize for. Her face was caked with makeup she didn’t need, but it was what she had to wear: long, fake eyelashes, dark eyeshadow and eyeliner, and red lipstick. “I got some groceries on the way home. Wanna help me bring them in?”
I walked to the car, opened the door, and grabbed the bags. There weren’t much, so I could carry them all in one trip.
We went into the house, and she said she’d be right back before going into her bedroom. I unloaded the groceries—jug of milk, box of cereal, some eggs, lunch meat, and a loaf of bread—before sitting at the small kitchen table and waiting.
Mom had been a stripper for years, but I never once judged her for it. Each new place we moved, she’d get a job at the local strip joint. There’d been times when she’d tried to work other places, but none of the waitressing or fast food jobs ever paid as much as stripping.
When she returned, her face was makeup free, and she was in stretchy pants, a baggy T-shirt, and had her dark hair on top of her head in a messy bun.
“Anything on your mind you wanna talk about, bug?” she asked as she brushed her fingers through my hair and sat down in the seat opposite mine. Not really sure where it’d come from, but she’d called mebugfor as long as I could remember. Just one of those nicknames that’d stuck. “Is your new school still goin’ okay?”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I’m not sure I’m going to like my drama class, though. I hate that they placed me in it.”
Her brow scrunched, and she took my hand. “I’m sorry we had to move to a new town again. I really feel like this one is it.” Her hopeful expression and caring voice made it hard to be sad in that moment.
We’d moved arounda lot. As in, I’d attended five different schools. My dad was the main reason for that. He was an abusive jerk who couldn’t just move on and kept showing back up in our lives.
Mom was only thirty-five, having been around my age when she’d had me, and my dad was a year older than her. When I was five, he had jerked me up by my arm and had dislocated it when I’d been crying. He’d knocked Mom around a lot before that point, but it had been the first time he’d ever laid a hand on me.
And then it’d kept happening.
Mom hadn’t had any other place to go and had been stuck in that situation. She hated herself for it, but I didn’t blame her. She eventually found the courage to leave him, and things were rough for us, but at least we were together and happier than we’d been with him.
However, every time we tried to start over, he’d find us.
Mom had tried getting restraining orders and all of that, but the system didn’t really work for poor people. She couldn’t afford a good attorney, and the authorities wouldn’t do anything without proof.
Apparently her bruises hadn’t been enough proof for them.
