Bobby Joe
an excerpt

I wasn’t really sure what I was thinking, looking back on it. Maybe I thought it would be some sort of great adventure, the kind I sometimes read about in comic books, or maybe I thought that my folks would come to their senses and we’d turn back around and go home. To our real home. See, when we drove up to the white-washed house with the driveway that needed repair and the front door with the peeling paint, that wasn’t our home. I hunkered down further in the backseat, my foot kicking the back of my mother’s chair until she turned around and glared at me.

I glanced up at her, not bothering to try and hide the scowl on my face, “What?”

“You could try enjoying yourself,” she told me, her brown hair pulled back into the bun she always wore. I often found myself wondering if she ever wore it down, because if she had, I’d never seen it.

I rolled my eyes and turned my head to gaze half-heartedly out of my window, my foot once more kicking the back of her chair. There was nothing here for me to enjoy, all my friends were back home. My school was back home, my comic book store was back home. I still didn’t understand why my parents had decided to move from our town to …. here. What was so great about here that our town didn’t have?

The car jerked and the brakes squealed a little as my dad pulled to a stop and put it in park, in the driveway of the new place that my folks were just beaming with excitement over. My mom reached over to hold my dad’s hand, squeezing it as they both just sat there, staring at the white-washed house. I just rolled my eyes in the backseat, grownups could be so stupid sometimes. It was just a dumb house, and not even my house. That was back in our old town. This place would never be my house.