✏️ Under One Roof

1. One Sister

This first chapter is dedicated to Bingus; and to all my other Ream, Ko-fi, and Patreon supporters who are now watching me write live on Google Docs.

The rain pounded down, pouring across the car windows. Tegan Spanner watched the individual drops joining together and then separating again, trying to find anything that would distract her from where she was heading.

Moistville. Even the name sounded grey and boring. Well, technically they weren't going to Moistville. They were heading to some no-name suburb on the edge of an unremarkable town, where nothing that she would care about could possibly happen. She hadn't even bothered to learn the name of the place; all she knew was that Moistville was the only university she would be able to travel to from here. And that was an important detail, because without her college fund there was no hope of her being able to afford a place of her own while she studied.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. She'd had a place lined up at the Anchorage College of Acoustic Arts. She'd interviewed and they wanted her there. It was her dream, an elite institution that extended an offer to less than one candidate in a hundred, and they had been eager to see her. That should have been the point when all of her dreams came true. An elite, specialist college had shown that they were willing to take her regardless of her final exam results. They wanted her, they really did. But as it turned out, their enthusiasm to have her study there didn't turn into fiscal support. They would pay for her tuition fees, flights out there at the start of every semester, or a room on campus, but not all three. She hadn't worried about that when they discussed the conditions of the bursary, because she'd known that her parents had set up a college fund for her, and had been regularly paying in money ever since she started high school.

She had been happy about that. When it came to discipline, or privileges around the house, or being able to spend time with friends, she had always had to defer to what was convenient for her big brothers. But the college fund was proof that her parents really cared. They had set money aside for her, so that at long last she would be able to do what she wanted.

When dad had given her the account book for those savings, cautioning her not to spend it all at once, she'd been determined to act responsibly. She had marched down to the bank on a day as dreary as today, just to check her balance. She'd had to line up to speak to a teller, because you couldn't use an ATM for a passbook savings account. She had known there would be a temptation, when she found out how much money she actually had. And she'd known that it would be foolish to waste her college money. She'd spent a long time thinking about it, and decided exactly how much she could afford to take out if the lure of a small fortune was too much to resist entirely. Enough to buy a new t-shirt, but not enough to break the bank. And then she'd broken down in tears when the teller told her that the account balance was thirteen cents. Her academic career was over before it had started; some person unknown had cleared out all her funds only a few days before.

Tegan wasn't just watching the raindrops now, or trying to focus on the spray from other cars when congestion cleared up enough to let them move a fraction. She was lost in her memories again, trying as hard as she could not to be overwhelmed by all her worries. She should have been used to the anxiety now; she'd lived her own life in fear of her brothers, and she was finally getting out from under their feet now. She should be relieved, but she couldn't deal with the amount of uncertainty she was feeling now. She knew she was fragile, and vulnerable. And that made her dread going back to school – or rather, starting her college career – even more. She just didn't know how things were going to turn out, and she hoped that other people wouldn't recognise how easy it would be to hurt her in her current confusion.