Jenni walked down the hall, trying to ignore the boxes, the empty rooms, and the picture-less walls.
“Good morning,” said her mother with feigned cheerfulness.
“Go to hell,” she thought.
Despite the attempts of her parents to create some normalcy, the entire picture seemed surreal to Jenni. Why did they have to move anyway? Why did they have to leave the only home that she had ever known for a frightening unknown in some hell-hole city in the middle of nowhere? She had been asking herself those questions since, eight months earlier, her parents had sat her down and announced that they were moving. At first she had cried and refused to accept it. She had wished that it had all just been a horrible nightmare and she would wake up the next morning knowing that she would never have to leave. She never told her friends that she was leaving until the last possible day; she didn’t want their pity. All she wanted was for things to be as they had always been – to go out with her friends, to plan for their 8th grade graduation, to not fear the future.
Eventually reality set in. The moving sign went up on the front lawn and soon enough the house was flooded with real estate agents and prospective buyers. Jenni hated it all. She hated the sign just for being there, she hated the heartlessness of the realtors and the pickiness of the buyers. Her world was ending and the dumbass buyers were too busy bitching that the dining room was too small or the bedrooms were too big. Didn’t they realize what she was going through? Soon enough her sadness turned to anger and bitter resentment. She hated her parents for putting her through it all; she hated her friends for not being able to understand. One day she had been so frustrated that she went outside and started beating the moving sign with a basketball. She thought that by destroying the sign she might have been able to destroy the reality that she would soon have to move away from the life that she had known and trusted so well.
Frustrated by the fact that the TV and the computer had both been packed up, Jenni went outside and sat dejectedly on the shaded porch. Inside she could hear her parents arguing about where to pack the remaining belongings that were still lying around.
Soon enough the moving truck arrived and several large, sweaty men began to load it up. As Jenni watched her life being packed away, she sighed. By now, she was past tears. She couldn’t feel anything, she was completely numb. Even when her next door neighbour arrived, in tears, to say goodbye, Jenni was unable to muster any sort of emotion. She firmly believed that she would never be able to feel happiness again.
“I think your phone has been disconnected. I tried to call you but I kept getting a “this number doesn’t exist” message,” said Erin, a friend of Jenni’s. She had arrived on her bicycle, hoping to persuade Jenni to come over to her house to go swimming.
The cold pool water was a nice reprieve from the sweltering August humidity and, for a moment, Jenni forgot that this was the last time that she would ever be able to just hop on her bike and go over to Erin’s for a swim. Her young mind had trouble understanding how, in the midst of the hardest time of her life, she could go through the motions of something so incredibly normal.
When she said goodbye to Erin, Jenni was unsure what to say. She promised to phone and e-mail, then said “see ya” and rode off as if they would be seeing each other again in a few days. She couldn’t admit, even to herself, that that would be the beginning of the end of one of the best friendships she’d ever had.
Returning to her house, Jenni found her best friend, who ironically was also named Erin, waiting on her front lawn. Jenni and Erin had known each other for eleven years, since they had both been two years old. Although they had grown apart in recent years, this would still be the hardest goodbye of them all. How do you say goodbye to your best friend? For a little while they just sat on the lawn, playing with Erin’s puppy and trying to forget that Jenni would be leaving in a short time.
This was what Jenni hated the most – trying to pretend that everything was normal. In a way she would have almost preferred tears and hugs to the faked smiles and promises that everything would work out. How could it all work out? Nothing could ever be the same as it had been, and nothing could be better than how her life had been.
Finally, as the sun began to set in a blaze of fire and the moving truck pulled away, Jenni’s parents told her that it was time to go. Somehow she mustered a goodbye to Erin and got into the car. The new owners of the house stood on the lawn, and Jenni had to struggle not to give them the finger. How could they look so damn happy?
Jenni’s dad started the car and pulled out of the driveway. Everyone waved as the car turned the corner with Jenni staring out of the back window. Staring as she watched the life she had once lived and loved disappear into the sunset.