When Love Arrives (H.S.)

Chapter 1

I glanced around my now empty childhood bedroom, feeling strangely nostalgic.  My house wasn't exactly a happy place for me, but it was a familiar one.  I didn't think it would be so very... emotional to be faced with the empty walls and shelves of my once-sanctuary, but I was comforted by a quote that I remembered reading, "It is so hard to leave until you leave.  And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world."  I read that in a book, actually (Paper Towns by John Green... He's a proper genius). 

At the ripe age of four years old, I learned the most important skill I would learn in my entire life.  It was the reading, the reading for so long that I forgot that there were smells besides paper and whatever the hell was holding books together anyway. This skill helped me get through most of my childhood. I had Sylvia, my childhood nanny, to thank.  She taught me how to read so young, probably to keep me occupied, but she opened the door that lead me out of my reality and I haven't looked back.

My books were like my best friends.  They weren't actually my best friends, of course, because (1) that would be a ridiculous form of personification and (2) I already had a best friend: my neighbor, Erica.  Erica has not only been a phenomenal friend for most of my life, but she has also been a very convenient friend.  She lives just next door, her bedroom window only a few yards away from my own.

This convenience was important because I didn't have the kind of parents who were willing to walk me to play dates, and I was way too young to navigate the streets of Manhattan on my own. Lucky enough, the McPartland household opened their home to me for many afternoons of my childhood.  Her parents practically let me join their family.

It's not that my family didn't like me exactly.  It was just that they always seemed to find me very inconvenient.  I had an older brother, Gabe, who was fifteen years older than I was.  Needless to say, I was a little surprise from the heavens above to my parents some twenty years ago.

It doesn't matter, exactly, but I feel it's important to say that my parents aren't, like, really old or anything.  They're in their fifties.  Gabe popped out when my parents were, like, sixteen or something like that.  They were really good at having surprise children. You would think that would give us something in common.  It did not.

Gabe... Well, Doctor Gabriel Knight, I should say, never really liked me.  Even now, when he's thirty-five years old, the man can hardly stand to be in the same room as me.  He thinks he's doing me some favor by faking it, but he's really not.  You know who he can stand, though?  My parents.  And they love him back all the more.  I am sure you can guess where that leaves me.

Specifically, that leaves me standing in the middle of my childhood bedroom at twenty years old, about to move into an apartment about thirty minutes away from here with my best friend.  My parents couldn't get off of work, they're both lawyers, and my brother who had promised he would help me get the last of my boxes packed had some sort of dermatologist-related emergency- those definitely don't exist, by the way- and bailed last minute. So, I, myself, carried the last of my big brown boxes out to the moving truck in front of my house.

Next door, I could see Erica hugging her mother in their hopefully last of many tearful goodbyes. I was annoyed. I couldn't help it. I wanted people to give a shit that I was leaving, too.

I threw the last box in the back of the truck and walked around to the passenger side door, climbing in.  Surprisingly, nobody was inside of it. I scanned Erica's front yard to see her father in the driveway talking to her boyfriend, Niall, who was driving us to our new apartment and helping us move in.

Yes, his name is literally Niall. He's, like, super Irish, moved to New York City after high school. It's not that I'm attracted Niall or anything. Actually, I kind of don't like Niall. He's a cocky bastard and I get that it's part of his charm, but it's just annoying. I don't get what's so special about him, but what they have is really something special and it's not fair. Erica met him at one of the seminars I dragged her to at Beymour University, which is where I go to school, not her. Not that I'm bitter or anything. It just seems sometimes that our luck is distributed unevenly. I would hate her if we weren't such great friends.