Don't Hurt Me

Chapter 34

"You're crazy," I whisper over the phone to my mother.

"Clare," she says, a little sharply. "It's only a couple of months before the school year is over. I can arrange for you and Rob to move to the school here – "

"You're crazy!" I repeat, shouting this time. I jump up with anger, startling Santa. "I don't want to move anywhere just because you and Dad are idiots!"

"Clare!"

"Why should we have to turn our lives upside-down because of you? Why?"

"Stop being such a baby."

"A baby? Oh, I'm the baby? I'm not the one who ran off to go crying up to her mother. I'm not the one who was complaining and whining for years and only waited till now to do something. I'm not the one! And I don't care if you want to leave everything behind, but I have school, and I have friends, and I – "

"Clare, you're just going to have to get over it."

"Get over this!" I retort, hanging up on her. Ha ha, this time, I'm the one who did it and not her. It's stupid though. The amount of satisfaction I get from that fizzles pretty quickly.

I wait until I've cooled down before going to get Alex. I find her right outside the door, her face a frown. "You heard?" I ask her.

She nods grimly. "She wants to move away?"

"Yeah," I sigh. "I don't know why I didn't see it coming."

"Are you really going to go?"

"I don't want to. But I don't see how I can't. I can't live here on my own."

"Maybe she just wants you guys to start over."

"Or maybe she's doing this for herself, and trying to fit us in with what she wants."

"I'm sure that's not true."

"It is what it is." I turn my thoughts to my brothers then. Like my mother said, Sam is graduating soon, so wherever he chooses to go to college, it wouldn't really matter. But Rob and I would be affected. I should talk to him, but I can't drop this on him over the phone. I guess I'll have to tell him tomorrow.

I catch Rob at lunch the next day. I pull him away from his table, herding him out into the hallway outside the cafeteria.

"This must be serious," he mutters as we face each other.

"Oh, you can't imagine."

"Oh, God, what is it?"

I take a long, patient breath, then tell him about my conversation with Mom.

"What?" he exclaims once I'm done, just as I expected he would, just as I hoped he would. Thank God at least Rob is with me on this. Alex seems to sympathize with my mother, and Sam will go along with just about anything Mom says.

Rob is blinking and stuttering now. "How can she …? How ... ? That's not fair!"

"Thank you."

"Callville? We'd have to go to a new school. We wouldn't know anybody."

"For another three years."

"No way," he hisses, for a rare moment looking impassioned. Seeing him like that gives me some hope. Maybe there is some way we can work around this. If we just put our heads together, maybe we can come up with a solution. If only Sam were on our side though. It feels like we're one man down, and I'm not used to that.

I sigh a little sadly. "She can't force us to go, can she?"

"Of course not." He thinks hard. "What about Dad?"

"What about him?"

"Should we try talking to him?"

"And what are we going to say? 'Please take us back until we finish school'? Maybe if we offered to pay rent, he'd go along with it."

"Jesus."

"How's he going to pay the mortgage without a job?"

"I don't know, but it's not our problem anymore, is it?"

No, it's not, but now we've got a whole other problem. The bell goes off, and kids start streaming out from the cafeteria, the doors swinging madly between them. "Well, if you come up with any ideas, Robbie, let me know."

"Yeah," he goes, not looking too confident. We flow with the crowd, and that's just how it feels – like we're caught in a river, and there's nothing we can do but go along with it.