First Chapter of a Tossed Manuscript

I don’t know a single writer who has managed to complete, edit, and publish the first book they ever wrote. The first ones are full of lagging plot lines, badly timed dramatics, and has at least one character misnamed for several chapters.

The below chapter is the first one of the book i ~technically started writing in 2008. In later re-edits i had to add in the father’s smart phone and other techy things since they didn’t exist when i started writing this. (i didn’t have a smart phone until my senior year of college. i feel old af now just for writing that.)

The first three or so chapters of this are by far the best: i used and reused them often in my fiction writing classes and evening groups. I believe i wrote about 65k of this but it’s only about 80% finished. For some reason, the plot climax was the hardest thing for me to think up, and upon looking back, i believe that’s because there are too many paper characters, side plots, and my overall boredom with this manuscript after way too many years fiddling with it.

So! Here’s chapter one, a tease for a book that will never be finished!

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Crack Running Crooked

Chapter One

I’ve never had a raccoon; I loved the dog we had until I was six or seven and while I don’t really like cats, I don’t want to imagine someone’s household pet lying on the side of the highway in a mess of ripped fur and jagged bones. Therefore, every time I look out the window and see something fuzzy on the side of the road, I close my eyes immediately and label it a raccoon, waiting a few heartbeats before opening my eyes again. Solid white fur? Raccoon. Easily 60 pounds and possibly a deer? Raccoon. I have never loved a deer before either but parts of Bambi were a little too similar to real life for me.

It is June 15th, and our second day in the car. I have seen 47 raccoons so far- 35 in six hours and five states yesterday, and the remainder in the hour or so we’ve been driving today. We have at least six more hours to go as long as we don’t stop to get a sit-down lunch (Hah! Then we’d have to talk!). The number of U-turns needs to drop off too. Dad has a map app running on his phone but he’s also talking to someone on it so he’s not really paying attention to where we’re going. Five turn-arounds so far this trip. None of the three of us are mentally or physically capable of being in the car for more than ten minutes together, so being forced in the same confined metal box as my dad and brother has been exceptionally quiet (on my end) and exceptionally stressful. Thankfully Dad’s car charger broke last week and he hasn’t gotten a new one yet. We stopped earlier than planned yesterday to get a hotel for the night so Dad could charge his phone even though there was still daylight when we closed our room doors. It was cold and slightly dingy and it was musty and it was heaven.

Cars swerve around us, blasting short honks to tell Dad to at least go the speed limit, but Dad doesn’t hear them. All he hears is the voice coming through the phone pressed to his ear. Alex sits in the front next to him, seat pushed all the way back and feet on the dashboard, staring out the window. His headphones make him look like Princess Leia from the right angle. The high quality of the headphones can’t silence the music blasting from its mini speakers. I can’t tell who it is- Metallica?

My head bumps against the window, strands of long light brown hair glued to my forehead and the back of my neck. The sun streaming inside is hotter than the oven when Mom and I used to make Christmas cookies. It’s already darkened the skin on my shoulders and arms and turns my long jeans into their own type of oven. I alter my position, moving slightly so the door’s armrest jabs into a different part of my back.

Dad curses into his phone, sliding a hand over his grizzled face. I notice that the further north we go, the more colorful his language gets. The U-turns we’ve made so far probably haven’t helped his normally volatile mood. Neither have his phone calls to the movers, real estate agents, and higher-ups from his suit-and-tie job as he readjusts his life.

I watch as he drifts the car a little too far to the right, the wheels sliding over the road vibrators. He drops his phone and jerks the wheel, overcompensating and almost launching us into the next lane. The red convertible next to us screams and speeds away. I don’t think Alex even noticed. Once he slips into his music it takes a power-outage to bring him back.

Horns blare again as Dad tries to get his phone, one heavy hand lopsided on the wheel. Alex and I used to make fun of all the tickets Dad used to get. Mom would say that Dad would lose his license the next time although he never did. The lawyers took care of the tickets and Mom took care of driving on family trips. 

Dad pulls into a gas station just off the highway, complaining to no one about gas prices and how much further we have to go. Alex, still plugged in, gets out of the SUV and heads to the station’s convenience store. I watch Dad fumble with his credit card, inserting it in the pump backwards. “Damnit,” he curses, loud enough to hear through the windows. I move to open the door behind me and slip out, walking on stained concrete to the store.

Alex is at the checkout when the bells on the door announce my entry. He hands the cashier a bill from his slim black duct tape wallet, the last Christmas present Mom got him. The corners are a little grayed and worn. He gets his change back and picks up his beef jerky strips and soda, passing by me and heading outside.

I move deeper into the store, down the aisles of sugary snacks and bright packaging. It reeks of cigarettes and stale sweat from too many truckers taking too few showers. In North Carolina, the gas stations sold beer and had big “beer caves” in the back corner, mini oasises in the hellish summer heat. No such thing here.

The bathroom is tiny, a flickering overhead light buzzing like a very large dying insect is stuck inside. The toilet barely flushes and the mirror is cracked in one corner. I avoid looking further up than just the crack as I wash my hands. I don’t want to see the round face I got from Dad, the light brown hair Alex and I share. The hazel eyes I got from Mom. The ones Dad said made him “fall head over heels for her the first time they met,” he told me before they went out to dinner for their twelfth wedding anniversary. He kissed me on the forehead and told Alex to listen to the babysitter this time, or else.  Mom smiled, diamond earrings sparkling. She looked so pretty all dressed up. She even let me put curlers in my hair when she was getting ready. That was seven years ago.

I get back in the car just as Dad finishes filling the tank. “I can’t believe these damn gas prices. Who the hell are these people, jacking up the price like that? Damn tank costs fifty bucks to fill. Not as bad as it used to be, but damn.”

Alex, headphones looped around his neck, asks “When are we getting dinner?”

 “It’s barely five,” Dad replies, turning on the engine. “We just ate at one anyway.”

 “And?” Alex says.

 “Later.”

We cross the Pennsylvania border after another hour, stopping in a fast food drive-through just beyond the sign. As Alex passes me my milkshake the bottom of it catches the back of his seat and almost sends the drink into my lap. I grab it from him and set it safely in the holder in the door.

Noise floats back from Alex’s headset again. Much simpler music, though the volume level is the same. I recognize it as the last composition Alex finished before we had to pack last week. His room was over mine and the bass notes made the walls shake. Dad wasn’t home to tell him to turn it down. He never is anymore. I sat on my stripped bed, grabbed a book from the closest open box, and waited for the movers.

The same book sits beside me on the leather seat, bookmarked with my phone. Some dense sci-fi novel that’s too complicated and long to be well-known. It’s set in a world that is very not this one and that’s why I like it. The soft cover is worn and missing a corner. I cover it with the wrapper from my dinner, my burger a little smushed. I bite into it and a blob of condiments slips out the back of the bun and onto my leg.

I sigh, wiping the ketchup and mustard mix off my jeans with a finger, depositing it on my wrapper. My finger feels the roughness of my jeans, the dampness of the mess. That part of my leg felt nothing; it was like I was touching someone else. Five years since the accident and the nerves still haven’t regenerated. The doctors said there was a chance they never will.

I’m lost in a world of ogres and vampires when we pull off the highway again. Dad stops at a motel with a dirty half-lit illuminated sign. Closing my book I shove it into my overnight bag, waiting for Dad to reemerge with the three keys. One room for each of us, since at seventeen, Alex and I were old enough to take care of ourselves and needed our own space. It was the same last night, my first time in a bed that wasn’t mine or a hospital’s since before the accident.

The brass key Dad hands to me has a little string attaching a tag, red pen numbering room 16. Dad’s room is on my right and Alex’s on my left. They go to their rooms fastest, slamming the red metal doors closed behind them. If Mom were here we’d all have the same room, two big beds in a nice hotel. We’d play Go Fish and I Spy until my eyes drooped shut. We all talked, rarely yelling unless Alex shot me in the head with his Nerf Gun again. The silence is the worst, thoughts no one will say humming in the air. Things we feel but we won’t say so the silence was what we heard and it screamed everything.

I struggle with my key in the lock, the moon and sign not enough light for me to see. When I finally get in the room is the temperature of a freezer and smells like no one’s cleaned it in weeks. A single lamp is the only light source. The double bed has a red patterned duvet and sad pillows that have a dip in the middle from too many heavy heads resting there.

We are a family of strangers.

A fist bangs on the metal door at ten. Sunlight streams through a gap in the heavy fabric curtains, adding to the dim lamp’s glow. I bookmark with my phone, sliding it in between the pages spread open on my lap and push myself off the squeaking mattress. The summer heat body-slams into me as I open the door. It doesn’t have the humidity of North Carolina, instead being a dryer heat that made me gasp for something to drink. I sigh, flick off the light switch, and close the door behind me, heading to the main office to drop off my key.

The car is running by the time I leave the office, the interior already ice-cold. Alex plugs into his music. I rest my head against the window and try to sleep, since last night was spent in my other world. Dad talks for over an hour, drifting on the highway, and when he is finished he nudges Alex. I watch him in the mirror attached to the windshield. “We’re almost there,” he says. Then he looks at me, the rear-view mirror circling his dark, deep set eyes. I look outside. The sky has darkened, the sun no longer visible. Dark clouds follow us.

Dad drives down the next tree-surrounded exit onto a pale asphalt road. The sky threatens to open, to pour an ocean on us. Seven streets take us through our new downtown and I see signs for car shops, diners, and hardware stores. Nothing is a chain store, I realize. None of the names are recognizable.

Dad pulls onto Hummingbird Lane. The trees are bigger than anything I’ve seen. Their branches are longer than the car and they’re moving in the strong wind that just started to rock the car. There are twigs and smaller branches on the ground, snapped off from the gusts. The street is made of very light-colored concrete.

He drives the car over a pot hole. In our old town it was rarely cold enough in the winters to cause the asphalt to freeze so potholes were a rarity and filled within a day or two. He curses and slows down and I know he is worried about the wheel, the hubcap, now having to deal with giant holes in the road. The car matched the nice suits he wore to work, the expensive Italian shoes, the top-of-the-line smart phone.

The tires roll over the curb again as Dad pulls into the driveway. The pavement is just as worn as the street, but it only has one crack running crooked across it, edges reaching up like mini mountain ranges. I look out at the house as Alex groans. “It’s all the real estate agent could find, especially with only a few weeks to complete the purchase.” Dad tells him. From the glance he gives Alex, I have a feeling there were other houses. Other houses that were too expensive. Mom and Dad worked their entire lives and lost it all when we lost Mom. Parts of me where lost with her even though the doctors put me back together with metal plates and screws and stapled my skin together with what skin was left. The physical therapists tried too. As did my tutor, the follow-up doctors, the neighborhood moms. They showed up with casseroles and condolences and offers to babysit Alex and me and after a few days, Dad told Alex to stop answering the door.

That’s what Shelly said when she and her mom visited me in the hospital after my surgery.  I shrugged and picked at the tape that held my IV in place. Shelly asked if my eyes hurt because the skin around them was black and purple and yellow and I said no, because it was my nose that was broken not my eyes. I didn’t tell her how I wished it was the other way around because then I would be able to pretend Dad had a worried look on his face and not the blame he stared at me with.

They get out, the wind blowing open their doors. Walking around the car and opening the back door, they each grab a box. I reach for my book bag, slinging it over my shoulder and climbing out. I step right into a giant puddle that soaks my sneakers and socks. Moving to the front of the car, I watch Alex and Dad take the boxes inside. I curl my toes inside my mucky socks, the cold water seeping into my skin. The wind whips my hair. I lean against the front grill, careful of the electronics in my bag, crossing my arms against the sudden simmer chill.

The new house is a brick ranch. Along the front are huge, scraggly, overgrown bushes that block the bottom half of the windows. The front door is a rusted storm door and a white inner door with a brass knocker. Alex opens the storm door, the wind taking it and smashing it wide open into the bushes. He tries to push the inner door, but it’s locked. He calls for Dad, who is waddling down the front path with a big box with ALEX written on the side in black permanent marker. Dad sets the box down on the front step, pulling the key from his pocket.

A raindrop lands on my cheek, startling me. It lazily rolls down my skin, clinging to my chin before the wind whips it away. I tilt my head back and watch the leaves dance. Another drop falls on my forehead, sliding down to my temple and into my hair.

The wind slows for a moment and in the silence of the still trees I can hear something—a high-pitched tune, a light-hearted one, coming from the mess of trees beside the cracked concrete of the driveway. I see a mess of dark hair, a leather jacket, and jeans appear through the pines. He picks up his head and stops moving and whistling a few feet from the driveway, his eyes on me. His jacket is dark brown and absent of any creases or wear marks. Underneath is a black v-neck t-shirt. His jeans are dark and fitted for his long legs, a belt buckle sticking out from under his shirt. The sneakers on his feet are dark, narrow and stained. I look back up at his face. His skin is a soft, dark sepia; his eyes a dark brown, and his hair is rolled into pencil-thin black dreadlocks that are pulled into a low ponytail.

“Finished checking me out?” he says, smiling.

My face burns and I drop my chin to my chest, hiding behind my hair to hide the coloring. His sneakers appear a few inches from mine, making my heart race even faster. Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to wake myself up from what I hope is just a dream.

Warm fingers touch my chin and my eyes snap open. Gently, he lifts my face so that my head is tilted back and we are looking eye-to-eye. He’s not much taller than me. “I was joking,” he says.

I twist my head to pull my face from his hands. “Thanks for the embarrassment. Nice to meet you, creepy person from the woods.”

He steps back, eyes a little wide. “Um, sorry? It was just a joke…”

I roll my eyes. “So funny.”

Glancing away from me, the guy reaches one hand up and scratches the back of his neck.

“Isn’t it a little warm for a leather jacket?” I ask, pointing at it.

“It’s gonna rain soon?” he says, eyebrows still slightly north. “I lost my rain jacket last week so this is all I have. I waterproofed it the best I can,” he explains, “since leather isn’t exactly water resistant.” He shifts on his feet, taking a step toward me again with his hand outstretched. “My name isn’t creepy-person-from-the-woods.”

Alex appears next to us. The boy – whose name I don’t even know yet- drops his hand. I shiver against the wind, my feet cold in my drenched shoes.