Chapter 1

The city thins out in stages. First the tall buildings drop away, then the crowded intersections, then the sidewalks where people actually walk. After that it’s just highway, strip malls, and the long flat nothing of suburbs multiplying outward like cells under a microscope.

I keep both hands on the wheel. Ten and two, the way the driving instructor drilled into me two months ago, back when getting my license felt like the one good thing happening in my life. Now I’m using it to follow a U-Haul down a highway I’ve never driven, in a ten-year-old Kia Soul that smells like the pine air freshener Mom hung from the rearview mirror this morning, like that would somehow make this feel like a road trip instead of what it actually is.

An evacuation.

The Kia is packed so full I can’t see out the back window. Garbage bags stuffed with clothes. Boxes of kitchen stuff Mom didn’t trust on the truck. My desk lamp wedged between the passenger seat and a laundry basket of shoes. Every time I take a curve, something shifts behind me and I hear the soft thud of my life rearranging itself.

Ahead of me, the U-Haul signals right. Mom drives it carefully, the way she does everything—cautious, deliberate, like she’s afraid one wrong move will shatter whatever fragile thing she’s still holding together. I can picture Jess in the passenger seat next to her, feet up on the dash, scrolling her phone, radiating resentment so hard the cab probably feels ten degrees hotter.

We’ve been driving almost two hours. Two hours from the apartment I grew up in, from Marcus and Dev and the court behind the rec center where we played pickup until dark. Two hours from the only school I’ve ever known, the hallways I could walk blindfolded, the cafeteria table by the window that was ours since freshman year.

Two hours isn’t that far. People say that. Mom said it, twice, while we loaded the truck this morning. It’s not like we’re moving across the country, guys. As if distance is the only thing that matters. As if you can’t lose everything without going very far at all.

My phone buzzes on the passenger seat.

Then again. Then three times in rapid succession, the vibrations blurring together into one long angry pulse against the fabric.

Jess.

It has to be Jess because nobody else texts me like that—five messages in the span of seconds, no pause, no waiting for a response, just a wall of whatever just crossed her mind. She knows I won’t look. She knows I hate it, that the sound of my phone going off while I’m driving makes my fingers tighten on the wheel and my jaw clench until my teeth ache. I’ve told her a hundred times. I’ve been driving for three months. Three months is nothing. I still check my mirrors too much, still brake a little too early at yellow lights, still feel my pulse spike when a semi passes me on the left.

The phone buzzes again. And again.

“What the hell, Jess,” I mutter to the windshield.

We’re close. The GPS says eleven minutes. Whatever emergency she’s made up can wait eleven minutes. I stare at the road ahead, at the U-Haul’s brake lights flaring as Mom slows for a turn, and I follow.

The neighborhoods here are flat. That’s the first thing I notice—everything is flat and spread out, like someone took a city block and pulled it apart like taffy. The houses sit on their little plots with their little lawns, spaced evenly apart, identical in their basic shape. Pitched roofs. Front porches. Driveways leading to garages. It looks like a drawing a kid would make of what a neighborhood is supposed to be. It looks like nowhere.

My phone starts buzzing again, and I actually reach over and flip it face-down, pressing it into the seat like I’m smothering it.

The U-Haul’s blinker comes on. We turn onto Ridgecrest Drive.

I know which house is ours before I even check the number, because it’s the one that looks like it gave up. The paint is faded to a color that might have been blue once but is now just tired. The siding is cracked in places. The yard is a mess—weeds, dead leaves piled against the front door, grass that hasn’t been mowed in what looks like weeks. A sagging chain-link fence runs along the front but gives up halfway down the left side, just stops, like even the fence couldn’t commit to this place. Every other house on the street is modest but kept up, and then there’s ours, squatting at the end like an apology.

Mom pulls the U-Haul into the narrow cracked driveway. I park on the street behind her, kill the engine, and sit there.

I don’t get out. Not yet. I look at the house through the windshield—the four windows staring back at me, two up, two down, the small concrete porch already crumbling at the edges, the dented garage door—and I think about my room in the apartment. The one with the water stain on the ceiling shaped like Florida that I used to stare at when I couldn’t sleep. The one where I could hear the city at night through the walls, buses and sirens and music from the bar on the corner, all of it proof that the world was still moving even when I wasn’t.

This place is silent. The kind of silent that presses against your ears.

Then I hear it—Jess’s voice, sharp and rising, cutting through the closed windows of the U-Haul cab.

“—a whole week, Mom! We missed a whole week!”

I can’t make out Mom’s response. It’s softer, measured, the tone she uses when she’s trying to smooth something over. I watch through the U-Haul’s passenger window as Jess’s hands fly up, gesturing wildly. Mom shakes her head. Jess says something else, and even muffled by glass and distance, I can hear the edge in it, that specific frequency my sister hits when she’s decided the world is personally conspiring against her.

I pick up my phone. Flip it over.

Eleven texts from Jess.

Chris
CHRIS
pick up your phone
our school starts JULY 28
we already missed the first week
A WHOLE WEEK
mom didnt even check
we’re going to walk in monday and everyone already knows each other
this is so fucked
i literally cant
CHRIS

I read them twice. Then I put the phone down and press my forehead against the steering wheel.

July 28. Our old school doesn’t start until the second week of August. It never even crossed my mind that a different district would have a different schedule, and from the sound of the argument still getting worse in the U-Haul cab, it didn’t cross Mom’s mind either.

So Monday. Monday we walk into a school where everyone has already had a full week to find their people, settle into routines, form the invisible bonds that determine everything about the next nine months. And we show up late. The new kids. The divorce kids. A week behind before we even start.

I lift my head. Through the windshield, the house stares at me with its four blank windows.

The U-Haul door swings open and Jess jumps down, her sneakers hitting the driveway hard. She’s already looking at me through the Kia’s windshield, arms spread wide in a can you believe this gesture so theatrical it would be funny if I had anything left in me that could find things funny right now.

Mom climbs down from the driver’s side, slower. She stands there for a moment with her hand on the door, looking at the house the way you look at something you’re trying very hard to love. She’s still pretty—she’s always been pretty, the kind of pretty that doesn’t need effort—but there’s a weight in her face that wasn’t there six months ago. A tightness around her eyes. She tucks her light brown hair behind her ear and turns to us with a smile that doesn’t quite make it to her eyes.

“Okay,” she says, and her voice carries that careful brightness, that almost-steady cheerfulness she’s been perfecting for months. “So the school thing—we’ll figure it out. It’s going to be fine.”

“It’s not fine,” Jess says.

“It’s a fresh start,” Mom says. She says it like she’s reading it off a motivational poster. Like if she says it enough times, it’ll become true. “For all of us.”

I finally open the car door and step out onto Ridgecrest Drive. The air is warm and still and smells like cut grass from someone else’s yard. A sprinkler ticks somewhere down the street. I look at the house again—the crumbling porch, the bare unkempt shrubs, the missing sections of fence—and I try to find the version of myself that can walk through that front door and call this home.

Jess catches my eye. For a second, just a second, the bratty anger drops and I see something underneath it that looks a lot like how I feel. Scared. Lost. Sixteen and standing in front of a house that belongs to strangers in a town that doesn’t know our names.

Then she rolls her eyes, crosses her arms, and says, “This place is a dump.”

Mom’s smile flickers but holds.

I shove my hands in my pockets and walk toward the porch, stepping over the pile of dried leaves nobody’s swept. The concrete shifts slightly under my weight, one corner of the step sinking a little, and I think: fresh start. Like you can just decide to be new. Like you can drive two hours down a highway and leave yourself behind with the skyline.

The key sticks in the lock. I have to jiggle it twice before it turns.

I push the door open and step inside.

The smell hits me first. Not terrible, exactly—just stale, like the air’s been sitting in here so long it forgot how to move. I step further inside and the floor creaks under my sneakers. The living room is small. Smaller than I expected, which is saying something because I wasn’t expecting much. A beige couch sags against the far wall like it’s been holding its breath for years, and across from it sits a TV stand with no TV on it, just a ring of dust where one used to be.

Mom slides in behind me, and I hear the little intake of breath she tries to cover with a smile.

“See? There’s already a couch.” She touches my arm as she passes, heading toward the kitchen. “One less thing to worry about.”

Jess pushes through the door and stops dead. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. Her face does all the talking—the way her eyes sweep the room and her mouth pulls tight at the corners.

The kitchen is worse. Yellowed linoleum that peels up at the edges, cabinets that look like they’ve survived a few decades of use, and a fridge that hums so loud I can feel it in my teeth. There’s a small dining table in the corner with four chairs, none of which match.

“And a table,” Mom says, running her hand along the surface. She picks up her pace, like if she moves fast enough we won’t have time to really look at anything. “Come on, let’s see upstairs.”

The stairs groan with every step. Jess grabs the handrail and a chip of paint flakes off under her fingers. She flicks it away without comment.

Upstairs is a narrow hallway with four doors. Mom opens the one on the left and peeks inside. “This one’s mine. It has its own bathroom, see?” She says it like she’s showing us a penthouse suite and not a small bedroom with a closet the size of a phone booth.

Jess and I drift to the right side of the hall. Two bedrooms, nearly identical. I open the first door—backyard-facing window. Jess opens the other one, window facing the street, both the same size, same shape.

“I want this one,” she says, pointing at mine.

“Why?”

“Because I do.”

“It’s the same room, Jess.”

“Then it shouldn’t matter if I take it.”

I stare at her. She stares back. This is the thing about having a twin—every single interaction is a chess match, and she never, ever lets you have a free move.

“Fine. Take it.”

She narrows her eyes like she’s trying to figure out if I’m playing some angle. I’m not. I genuinely don’t care. I walk into the other room—street view, same size, same nothing—and stand there for a second. My room now I guess.

“Okay!” Mom claps her hands together from the hallway, that bright voice cranked up to full volume. “Let’s get unloading. The sooner we get everything in, the sooner we can settle in and make this place ours.”

The U-Haul is a furnace. I don’t know how stuff can bake this fast in the back of a truck, but every box I grab radiates heat against my chest. Mom backs in first and we start with the mattresses because she says it’ll be nice to have somewhere to collapse later. Smart. The queen is awkward and heavy and we tilt it through the front door at an angle that almost takes out the hallway light fixture. We wrestle it up the stairs sideways, Mom pulling from the top, me pushing from below, both of us breathing hard.

Jess is somewhere. Not here.

We get the queen propped against Mom’s bedroom wall and go back for the twins. They’re lighter, at least. I carry mine up by myself, gripping the plastic wrap with both hands while it tries to bend in half around every corner. Jess’s twin mattress goes up next, Mom and I doing the work while Jess leans in her doorway scrolling her phone.

“You could help,” I say, not even annoyed yet. Just stating a fact.

“I carried stuff.”

“What stuff?”

She holds up a small box she brought up at some point. It says JESS - BATHROOM in marker on the side.

I don’t have the energy for this. I never have the energy for this. Jess has a way of turning any argument into a war of wear-and-tear, and she will always, always outlast me because she runs on spite and I run on reason, and spite is a renewable resource.

So I ignore her and keep moving.

Boxes come next. Then the dresser, which takes all three of us and still almost kills us on the stairs. Then the kitchen boxes, the bathroom boxes, the bags of linens Mom stuffed into garbage bags because we ran out of packing material. Jess carries things occasionally—a lamp, a small bag—but mostly she describes her unhappiness with the house, the neighborhood, the temperature, the distance from civilization, the lack of cell signal, the unfairness of life itself.

“There’s literally nothing here,” she says from the porch, arms crossed, watching Mom and me shuffle past with a box of pots and pans. “Like, I looked on Maps. The nearest Starbucks is twenty minutes away.”

“The horror,” I mutter.

“You don’t even drink coffee, Chris, so shut up.”

I keep moving. Box on the kitchen counter. Back outside. Down the porch steps. Across the yard to the driveway. Into the oven that is the U-Haul. Grab another box. Repeat.

It must be close to the hundredth trip when I notice her.

I’m walking back toward the U-Haul, arms empty, shirt stuck to my back with sweat, and I glance across the street mostly out of habit—just scanning, the way you do when you’re in a new place and everything is still new to you. And there she is.