A cold wind blew on the back of my neck, and I had turned my headset into an impromptu set of speakers by facing them upwards on my desk, blasting music at full volume. The soundtrack of “Cassette Beasts” filled my room and even managed to escape into the wider world through the open window behind me. I wanted to make sure I could hear my dad’s car drive into the cul-de-sac, so the open window was a necessity.
I had been playing my game for less than 30 minutes when I heard the unmistakable sound of a Range Rover slowing down in front of my house. I jumped up from my chair while saving my game in one swift motion. Before I knew it, I found myself downstairs with my backpack in hand.
The almost antique SUV opened its door, and a bulky man dressed in full denim stepped out of it. The tiny bit of hair still present on top of his head was hidden underneath a faded green flat cap. A warm smile was visible underneath his bushy beard, while his green eyes were looking right at me. “Hey Kiddo! How have you been?” the man said in a deep voice.
I didn’t even lock the door as I ran over towards my dad, ready to give him a big hug. My body fell into his warm embrace and stayed there for about a second until I pushed myself back onto my own two feet. While possessing a broad body, my dad wasn’t the biggest champion in the height department, allowing me to make eye contact without looking upwards for once.
“A whole lot better now that you are here,” I told him confidently.
“Well, it’s going to be a little bit of a ride down to Chelsea, so you better be getting in the car,” he said, leaving out all the r’s that sentence would normally possess.
I gave him a quick nod, threw my backpack on the backseat, and sat down in the passenger seat. The old Range Rover stood a lot higher on the road than most cars, so looking out of the window gave me a weird perspective on the houses around here. Being up higher made me feel weirdly confident, a confidence only being raised as my dad sat down beside me.
Before he started the car though, he looked at me and spoke. “First, hand me a tonic from the glove cabinet, and grab one for yourself too.”
I released the latch in front of me, revealing a little compartment filled with random papers, an ice scraper, and four cans of coke. I took two of them out, handing one to my dad. Both of us opened our cans simultaneously, the refreshing sizzle of gas escaping from cans warming our ears. We pushed our cans together like we were toasting and took a big sip.
The sugary soda activated my brain while my dad put his keys in the ignition to start the car’s engines. The low hum of the car engines now filled the cabin while my dad asked, “Now, tell me everything I’ve missed in the last five months.”
***
You could almost say it was therapeutic. For the last few days, I had drowned myself in my own sorrows, actively trying to suppress any thoughts or memories coming to the surface. But while sharing those memories with my dad, I was suddenly forced to relive them. Initially, this didn’t really affect me. Telling him about the incredibly ambitious plan to build a treehouse in Riley’s yard, and how we never got any further than hanging a single rope from a single branch didn’t really do anything on its own.
But as I kept sharing stories, I couldn’t help but notice a recurring character in the stories, apart from myself, of course. Every noteworthy thing I had done over the past five months had involved Riley in one way or another. It was weird because it made me have two trains of thought that almost completely opposed each other.
On the one hand, I kind of felt bad for her. She had always been there no matter what. Everything we did, we did together. She hadn’t even seemed all that mad after I blew up against her at the mall last week. And now I was just totally ignoring her; she had never done anything like that.
But simultaneously, it also made me feel angrier at her. How long had she known she was moving away and didn’t tell me? There had been a million opportunities to tell me, and she never did, even though we normally didn’t hide anything from each other. She knew how much we relied on each other; how could she just leave me like that? Even mentioning her name caused me to grit my teeth subconsciously.
There was one thing that made this even more painful, though. The fact that she told Rachel about it, somebody who she had only known for a few flipping days. And both were still hiding it from me to this very day.
As we got closer and closer to Boston, this part of the I-93 was remarkably featureless. Four lanes going both ways flanked with an infinitely stretching row of oaks. An overpass here or there would break up the monotony from time to time, but it really didn’t get more exciting than that. The outside world wasn’t going to be able to distract me from my internal struggle right now.
Suddenly, a loud bang ripped through my eardrums, waking me up from my omnipresent internal thoughts. “What was that?” I yelled out loud while looking at my dad’s surprisingly calm face. I could now hear some metal scraping against the asphalt from time to time while the car’s movements felt dangerously bouncy.
He slowed the car down and allowed it to shift to the far-right side of the road. “I am assuming that is one of our tires that just burst,” he expressed while holding his head sideways. “I'll just put her down on the emergency lane, and we will have a look.”
It felt weird to step out of the car while still being on the highway. “Shouldn’t we call someone? Like road services or something? This all feels a bit dangerous,” I yelled at my dad, trying to make myself heard over all the traffic behind us.
“Don’t worry, son; I got all the tools we need right here,” my dad said as he opened the trunk to reveal a spare tire, a wrench, a jack, and a whole lot more that we apparently didn’t need right now. While I wasn’t sure that fixing the car on the side of the road was technically what one was supposed to do, it was an inspiring sight for sure. A sudden problem had presented itself to my dad, and here we were only minutes later with him fixing that problem on the spot.
“Do you need a hand with anything?” I asked him in an attempt to be helpful.
“I think I’m good. Just give me a shout if any of The Boys are riding around,” he answered while his face was hidden behind the jacked-up backside of the car.
I was a little confused with his vocabulary sometimes. “The Boys?”
“I mean the cops; tell me if you see any cops coming.”
Being asked to warn about cops made me question the legality of my father’s actions right here. But if we got back on the road quickly, I didn’t feel like it was my place to complain.
In the end, it didn’t take long until a new tire was attached to the back right side of the car, and all four wheels stood safe and secure on the ground again. We got back into the car and resumed our way down to the Boston suburbs.
***
ARMACH: You down to play some games this weekend?
NOBLIN: Sry, I am not home right now. At my dad’s. Don’t have a PC there.
ARMACH: sadge… Have fun with your dad, I guess? Idk if he’s fun, can’t be as fun as me though
NOBLIN: shush, my dad is great. You are nowhere near the level to compare yourself to him yet.
ARMACH: Just give me a shot, and I’m sure I can reach that level in no time. I doubt he ever won the Maelk award playing carry.
NOBLIN: You know that’s not a good thing, right?
ARMACH: Matter of perspective.
“You having a good laugh?” My dad asked me from the other side of the couch. “Who are you talking to?”
I wiped the smirk caused by Arthur’s awful joke off my face while stashing my phone back in my pocket. “Nothing, just Riley saying something silly.”
My dad looked at me with the slightest hint of distrust. “What was she doing this weekend anyway?”
She hadn’t told me, but I knew exactly where she was right now. This weekend, Riley and her parents would finally gain access to their new house in Battingham, so they would already start moving stuff over. Not that she told me about this herself. No, I clearly wasn’t important enough for her to deserve the truth.
“Off to see some kind of show her parents worked on down in New York,” I said, barely hiding the disgust I now felt for that family.
“And you weren’t asked to come with like normally? I remember how you were talking about Hadestown non-stop before I left on my last trip.”
“Can we just watch the movie, Dad? I don’t want to talk about it,” I scowled.
All of a sudden, the sounds of WW2 tanks roaring across the French countryside were brought to an abrupt stop as my dad paused the movie. “I have told you this a thousand times, kiddo; real men talk about their problems. And with the venom I’m tasting every time you talk about Riley, I know something is up.”
Real men? Yeah… If only he knew what this “man” was up to a week ago… “It’s nothing! She has just been a bit annoying lately. Don’t worry about it; I’m sure next time I’m here we will be best buds again… Can we just watch the movie?”
His steely-eyed gaze indicated that my old man wasn’t budging. “I was hoping that you would be man enough to bring it up yourself at some point, but it’s already Saturday night, and I don’t want to bring this stuff up in the rover.”
“Not to mention the fact that your mother told me you’ve been trying to skip class; you know that walking away from your problems isn’t going to solve anything.”
I really couldn't deal with my father’s moral grandstanding sometimes, especially coming from him. “Like you walked away from Mom?”
A slight sigh betrayed his annoyance. “That’s below the belt, Jason; it was a mutual decision.”
“I remember the yelling and--”
“Jason. Stop changing the subject; we have been through this. If you want to talk about your divorce-based trauma again, we can do so tomorrow.”
I looked away from him and crossed my arms defiantly. I hate it when he’s right. And when he calls me by name. Or this name, at least.
It must have been about 15 seconds of silence before I finally broke. He wasn’t going to let this go, and seeing how sooner than later he would probably be sailing again, I might as well spill the beans.
“She lied to me.”
“That’s it?” My dad’s voice seemed to have lost that sense of annoyance, replaced by a more inquisitive tone instead.
“About… About… Her family is moving to Battingham. And she didn’t tell me. But she did tell another friend!”
“And why do you think she has been hiding this from you?”
Once again, I scowled. “Stop being my therapist and start being my father if you want me to talk about it.”
“I can be both,” he smirked.
“Ugh… because she is an awful person who only cares about themselves.”
“Both of us know that’s not true; she is--”
“It is!” I interjected.
My dad, however, wasn’t having any of it. He held up his hand, signaling me to stop talking and let him finish.
“You think she didn’t know you wouldn’t be taking it well? We both know you have the emotional stability of a potato; the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all. Even if she told you right away, you would probably have responded this way.”
I almost wanted to object again, but his self-deprecation gave him the benefit of the doubt. I still hated it when he was right though. I guess there was a lot I was hating right now, myself included.
“Nice parenting, Dad, making fun of your only kid’s mental resilience.”
“I don’t know, apart from that little fact, and maybe some other shortcomings, you’ve turned out pretty great. Brutal honesty can be quite effective, you know?”
“And now you are going to tell me to employ some of that brutal honesty myself and talk with Riley about the fact that she is abandoning me.” I scowled.
Underneath the Amazon rainforest that was my father’s beard, I could spot a big smile. “See! Smart enough to pick up on subtle conversational hints. That’s exactly what I meant with ‘turning out pretty great’.”
His jokes were starting to get on my nerves. How was he simultaneously expecting me to open up to him about my most vulnerable insecurities, but doing so with the subtlety of an average Republican political campaign?
“You know what, if it's brutal honesty you want, brutal honesty is what you will get!”
If he wanted me to talk to the traitor herself, he better bear witness to the shitshow itself as well. I grabbed my phone, and only a few button presses later, I was now ringing up Riley. I clicked the loudspeaker and set it down on the couch between us while looking my dad in the eyes confidently.
It took about 10 seconds before Riley picked up, and her voice echoed through the room.
“Emily? What’s up?”
Gwenington Hey there lovely readers, that was a pretty long hiatus wasn't it?
It turns out that my need for perfection sometimes causes me to lose confidence in my work causing me to feel anxious about working on it because in my head it will suck anyway. Compare this with having very little time and energy due to being swamped by work and volunteering, and suddenly you stop writing for more than a month.
Weirdly enough though, christmas season should bring me a lot of extra time, so i'm sure y'all get more than enough chapter out of me the coming month.
Just remember, the story is far from dead, and I will finish it soon than later!
A cold wind blew on the back of my neck, and I had turned my headset into an impromptu set of speakers by facing them upwards on my desk, blasting music at full volume. The soundtrack of “Cassette Beasts” filled my room and even managed to escape into the wider world through the open window behind me. I wanted to make sure I could hear my dad’s car drive into the cul-de-sac, so the open window was a necessity.
I had been playing my game for less than 30 minutes when I heard the unmistakable sound of a Range Rover slowing down in front of my house. I jumped up from my chair while saving my game in one swift motion. Before I knew it, I found myself downstairs with my backpack in hand.
The almost antique SUV opened its door, and a bulky man dressed in full denim stepped out of it. The tiny bit of hair still present on top of his head was hidden underneath a faded green flat cap. A warm smile was visible underneath his bushy beard, while his green eyes were looking right at me. “Hey Kiddo! How have you been?” the man said in a deep voice.
I didn’t even lock the door as I ran over towards my dad, ready to give him a big hug. My body fell into his warm embrace and stayed there for about a second until I pushed myself back onto my own two feet. While possessing a broad body, my dad wasn’t the biggest champion in the height department, allowing me to make eye contact without looking upwards for once.
“A whole lot better now that you are here,” I told him confidently.
“Well, it’s going to be a little bit of a ride down to Chelsea, so you better be getting in the car,” he said, leaving out all the r’s that sentence would normally possess.
I gave him a quick nod, threw my backpack on the backseat, and sat down in the passenger seat. The old Range Rover stood a lot higher on the road than most cars, so looking out of the window gave me a weird perspective on the houses around here. Being up higher made me feel weirdly confident, a confidence only being raised as my dad sat down beside me.
Before he started the car though, he looked at me and spoke. “First, hand me a tonic from the glove cabinet, and grab one for yourself too.”
I released the latch in front of me, revealing a little compartment filled with random papers, an ice scraper, and four cans of coke. I took two of them out, handing one to my dad. Both of us opened our cans simultaneously, the refreshing sizzle of gas escaping from cans warming our ears. We pushed our cans together like we were toasting and took a big sip.
The sugary soda activated my brain while my dad put his keys in the ignition to start the car’s engines. The low hum of the car engines now filled the cabin while my dad asked, “Now, tell me everything I’ve missed in the last five months.”
***
You could almost say it was therapeutic. For the last few days, I had drowned myself in my own sorrows, actively trying to suppress any thoughts or memories coming to the surface. But while sharing those memories with my dad, I was suddenly forced to relive them. Initially, this didn’t really affect me. Telling him about the incredibly ambitious plan to build a treehouse in Riley’s yard, and how we never got any further than hanging a single rope from a single branch didn’t really do anything on its own.
But as I kept sharing stories, I couldn’t help but notice a recurring character in the stories, apart from myself, of course. Every noteworthy thing I had done over the past five months had involved Riley in one way or another. It was weird because it made me have two trains of thought that almost completely opposed each other.
On the one hand, I kind of felt bad for her. She had always been there no matter what. Everything we did, we did together. She hadn’t even seemed all that mad after I blew up against her at the mall last week. And now I was just totally ignoring her; she had never done anything like that.
But simultaneously, it also made me feel angrier at her. How long had she known she was moving away and didn’t tell me? There had been a million opportunities to tell me, and she never did, even though we normally didn’t hide anything from each other. She knew how much we relied on each other; how could she just leave me like that? Even mentioning her name caused me to grit my teeth subconsciously.
There was one thing that made this even more painful, though. The fact that she told Rachel about it, somebody who she had only known for a few flipping days. And both were still hiding it from me to this very day.
As we got closer and closer to Boston, this part of the I-93 was remarkably featureless. Four lanes going both ways flanked with an infinitely stretching row of oaks. An overpass here or there would break up the monotony from time to time, but it really didn’t get more exciting than that. The outside world wasn’t going to be able to distract me from my internal struggle right now.
Suddenly, a loud bang ripped through my eardrums, waking me up from my omnipresent internal thoughts. “What was that?” I yelled out loud while looking at my dad’s surprisingly calm face. I could now hear some metal scraping against the asphalt from time to time while the car’s movements felt dangerously bouncy.
He slowed the car down and allowed it to shift to the far-right side of the road. “I am assuming that is one of our tires that just burst,” he expressed while holding his head sideways. “I'll just put her down on the emergency lane, and we will have a look.”
It felt weird to step out of the car while still being on the highway. “Shouldn’t we call someone? Like road services or something? This all feels a bit dangerous,” I yelled at my dad, trying to make myself heard over all the traffic behind us.
“Don’t worry, son; I got all the tools we need right here,” my dad said as he opened the trunk to reveal a spare tire, a wrench, a jack, and a whole lot more that we apparently didn’t need right now. While I wasn’t sure that fixing the car on the side of the road was technically what one was supposed to do, it was an inspiring sight for sure. A sudden problem had presented itself to my dad, and here we were only minutes later with him fixing that problem on the spot.
“Do you need a hand with anything?” I asked him in an attempt to be helpful.
“I think I’m good. Just give me a shout if any of The Boys are riding around,” he answered while his face was hidden behind the jacked-up backside of the car.
I was a little confused with his vocabulary sometimes. “The Boys?”
“I mean the cops; tell me if you see any cops coming.”
Being asked to warn about cops made me question the legality of my father’s actions right here. But if we got back on the road quickly, I didn’t feel like it was my place to complain.
In the end, it didn’t take long until a new tire was attached to the back right side of the car, and all four wheels stood safe and secure on the ground again. We got back into the car and resumed our way down to the Boston suburbs.
***
ARMACH: You down to play some games this weekend?
NOBLIN: Sry, I am not home right now. At my dad’s. Don’t have a PC there.
ARMACH: sadge… Have fun with your dad, I guess? Idk if he’s fun, can’t be as fun as me though
NOBLIN: shush, my dad is great. You are nowhere near the level to compare yourself to him yet.
ARMACH: Just give me a shot, and I’m sure I can reach that level in no time. I doubt he ever won the Maelk award playing carry.
NOBLIN: You know that’s not a good thing, right?
ARMACH: Matter of perspective.
“You having a good laugh?” My dad asked me from the other side of the couch. “Who are you talking to?”
I wiped the smirk caused by Arthur’s awful joke off my face while stashing my phone back in my pocket. “Nothing, just Riley saying something silly.”
My dad looked at me with the slightest hint of distrust. “What was she doing this weekend anyway?”
She hadn’t told me, but I knew exactly where she was right now. This weekend, Riley and her parents would finally gain access to their new house in Battingham, so they would already start moving stuff over. Not that she told me about this herself. No, I clearly wasn’t important enough for her to deserve the truth.
“Off to see some kind of show her parents worked on down in New York,” I said, barely hiding the disgust I now felt for that family.
“And you weren’t asked to come with like normally? I remember how you were talking about Hadestown non-stop before I left on my last trip.”
“Can we just watch the movie, Dad? I don’t want to talk about it,” I scowled.
All of a sudden, the sounds of WW2 tanks roaring across the French countryside were brought to an abrupt stop as my dad paused the movie. “I have told you this a thousand times, kiddo; real men talk about their problems. And with the venom I’m tasting every time you talk about Riley, I know something is up.”
Real men? Yeah… If only he knew what this “man” was up to a week ago… “It’s nothing! She has just been a bit annoying lately. Don’t worry about it; I’m sure next time I’m here we will be best buds again… Can we just watch the movie?”
His steely-eyed gaze indicated that my old man wasn’t budging. “I was hoping that you would be man enough to bring it up yourself at some point, but it’s already Saturday night, and I don’t want to bring this stuff up in the rover.”
“Not to mention the fact that your mother told me you’ve been trying to skip class; you know that walking away from your problems isn’t going to solve anything.”
I really couldn't deal with my father’s moral grandstanding sometimes, especially coming from him. “Like you walked away from Mom?”
A slight sigh betrayed his annoyance. “That’s below the belt, Jason; it was a mutual decision.”
“I remember the yelling and--”
“Jason. Stop changing the subject; we have been through this. If you want to talk about your divorce-based trauma again, we can do so tomorrow.”
I looked away from him and crossed my arms defiantly. I hate it when he’s right. And when he calls me by name. Or this name, at least.
It must have been about 15 seconds of silence before I finally broke. He wasn’t going to let this go, and seeing how sooner than later he would probably be sailing again, I might as well spill the beans.
“She lied to me.”
“That’s it?” My dad’s voice seemed to have lost that sense of annoyance, replaced by a more inquisitive tone instead.
“About… About… Her family is moving to Battingham. And she didn’t tell me. But she did tell another friend!”
“And why do you think she has been hiding this from you?”
Once again, I scowled. “Stop being my therapist and start being my father if you want me to talk about it.”
“I can be both,” he smirked.
“Ugh… because she is an awful person who only cares about themselves.”
“Both of us know that’s not true; she is--”
“It is!” I interjected.
My dad, however, wasn’t having any of it. He held up his hand, signaling me to stop talking and let him finish.
“You think she didn’t know you wouldn’t be taking it well? We both know you have the emotional stability of a potato; the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all. Even if she told you right away, you would probably have responded this way.”
I almost wanted to object again, but his self-deprecation gave him the benefit of the doubt. I still hated it when he was right though. I guess there was a lot I was hating right now, myself included.
“Nice parenting, Dad, making fun of your only kid’s mental resilience.”
“I don’t know, apart from that little fact, and maybe some other shortcomings, you’ve turned out pretty great. Brutal honesty can be quite effective, you know?”
“And now you are going to tell me to employ some of that brutal honesty myself and talk with Riley about the fact that she is abandoning me.” I scowled.
Underneath the Amazon rainforest that was my father’s beard, I could spot a big smile. “See! Smart enough to pick up on subtle conversational hints. That’s exactly what I meant with ‘turning out pretty great’.”
His jokes were starting to get on my nerves. How was he simultaneously expecting me to open up to him about my most vulnerable insecurities, but doing so with the subtlety of an average Republican political campaign?
“You know what, if it's brutal honesty you want, brutal honesty is what you will get!”
If he wanted me to talk to the traitor herself, he better bear witness to the shitshow itself as well. I grabbed my phone, and only a few button presses later, I was now ringing up Riley. I clicked the loudspeaker and set it down on the couch between us while looking my dad in the eyes confidently.
It took about 10 seconds before Riley picked up, and her voice echoed through the room.
“Emily? What’s up?”
Gwenington Hey there lovely readers, that was a pretty long hiatus wasn't it?
It turns out that my need for perfection sometimes causes me to lose confidence in my work causing me to feel anxious about working on it because in my head it will suck anyway. Compare this with having very little time and energy due to being swamped by work and volunteering, and suddenly you stop writing for more than a month.
Weirdly enough though, christmas season should bring me a lot of extra time, so i'm sure y'all get more than enough chapter out of me the coming month.
Just remember, the story is far from dead, and I will finish it soon than later!
