Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You think I don’t know that?” Abby yells at her daughter. “You act like I have a choice! We don’t have the money to live in the city anymore, Clarke.”

Clarke looks at her mother, tears welling in her eyes. “You can’t make me leave! Just like that? I have one year left. One! I have friends, Mom.”

“Oh, don’t give me that bullshit,” Abby sneers. “I can’t even remember the last time I saw Niylah.”

Clarke looks at her mother with disgust. “Fuck you!” she yells back and quickly turns on her heel. She runs up the stairs as tears stream down her face. Fuck her mom and her new job. They have lived in the city since Clarke was twelve years old. It’s all that she knows, and now her mother is ripping it away from her, as if her life hasn’t changed enough in the past year.

Moving all the way from New York City to some random town upstate is not only painfully inconvenient, but also, in her eyes, incredibly cruel. She has one year left of high school, and she prefers to finish it around people she grew up with — even if she doesn’t talk to her friends as much as she used to.

It is apparent to everyone in her life that after the crash she was never the same. She’s a shell of who she used to be, in all honesty. Her friends try to be there for her — they really do — but they can only handle her anger to a certain extent.

It isn’t that she is angry at them, per se, but rather the world. She curses God, or whoever controls her existence, asking why it has to be her to shatter her leg. Why she has to live with a permanent disability the rest of her life. The stupid brace that everyone looks at — she curses God for it. She curses God repeatedly. She asks why it has to be her — why it has to be him.

If someone were to tell her a year ago that she would no longer hang out with her friends, or that her grade average would be a C, or even that she would wear sweatpants and sweatshirts to school every day instead of a real outfit, she would have told them they were lying. If someone were to tell her that her father would die in a car crash with her sitting in the passenger seat, she would have
punched them in the face.

She thinks back to the moment her life changed forever. One moment Jake and she were peacefully driving on their way to the grocery store, and the next, a Ford truck rammed directly into the driver’s side, effectively crushing her father.

The car had rolled onto its side, her head hitting the cracked passenger seat window. It took a few seconds to regain her bearings before she touched her head and felt the warm blood.

The whole car was crushed. When she looked down into the footwell, she noticed that the dashboard had crumpled in on itself and her left leg. She tried to move; she had so much adrenaline coursing through her that she barely felt any pain. She started tugging on her leg with her bloodied hands, but the only thing that came from it was the fabric ripping against the splintered plastic of the dashboard. In a time that felt much longer than a few seconds, she craned her neck towards her father. She wished that she hadn’t.

“What the fuck!” she screamed. “Dad!”

Her father hung limp from his seat above her, the whole left side of his body crushed. Blood dripped down his face onto her. Her dad, the man who had raised her, was unrecognizable next to her.

She began screaming from the top of her lungs, thrashing against her seatbelt. Her brain was too muddled to think straight. Never in her life had she seen so much blood. She reached out to grab him, clawing at his seatbelt, trying to find a way to get him out. She wasn’t thinking straight. She wasn’t even unbuckled.

“Dad? Dad!” she yelled. “Wake up, Dad!”

But he wasn’t going to wake up.

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She stands in her room; the walls are bare for the first time since her family moved in. It is an odd sight and makes Clarke uncomfortable. She wonders what the new house will look like.

“Moving truck’s here!” her mother calls from downstairs.

Clarke sighs. She picks up her suitcase full of the rest of her clothes and leaves her childhood room one last time.

“Coming,” she calls back as she pads down the steps.

It has been a week since her mother broke the news about moving upstate. The town is called Arkadia. It’s a relatively small town, but big enough that not everybody knows each other. Abby’s friend, Dr. Kane, works at a hospital there — he’s the one who put in a good word for Abby. Since the town is smaller, so are the hospitals, and Arkadia Medical Center was in need of a new Chief of Surgery, so Abby quickly took the job. It pays better than her current job, just with a little less prestige than working at New York-Presbyterian.

It is currently Friday. Abby wants to have them moved into their new house by Saturday, and they both start their respective schedules on Monday — Abby with her new job, and Clarke with her new school.

To say Clarke is nervous about the fresh start is an understatement. She couldn’t be more nervous, in all honesty. At her current high school in the city, she knows everybody, even if she doesn’t really talk to them anymore. At Arkadia High School she won’t know anyone. The only comforting thing about all of this is that she has only one more year of school before she can leave that town for good and go to college.

“Help me get these boxes in the truck,” Abby says, pointing at the boxes next to the couch. “I want to get on the road as fast as possible.”

“Sure,” Clarke says, knowing her mom is already going to piss her off today.

They load the truck together while the U-Haul driver and his team work on getting the heavy furniture. Clarke is quiet the whole time.

“Are you really going to be like this the whole day?” Abby asks.

“Like what? I’m doing what you told me to do.” She shrugs. “Moving the boxes.”

“You know what I mean, Clarke.” Abby looks pointedly at her. “I really can’t deal with an attitude for five hours. Buck up, please. I’m asking this one time.”

Clarke looks at her mother incredulously, like she just told her to run fifty miles in an hour. “‘Buck up’? Seriously? How about you gain some sense and put all this shit back in the house so I can actually live my life!”
“Clarke!” Abby quietly snaps, so the movers who are exiting the house with the leather couch don’t hear. “Don’t disrespect me. We are leaving. Please start to come to terms with it. I know it’s hard, but it has to happen, and I need you to start acting mature about it.”

“Disrespect—” Clarke just shakes her head. She can’t believe this. Is her mother really this dense? “You know what? Fine, I’ll stop disrespecting you. Let’s just get this over with.”

Her mother nods her head in agreement, and they continue to pack the truck. They finish pretty quickly, much to her mother’s satisfaction, and get on the road almost as soon as the movers leave. Clarke has her headphones in, while her mom listens to a podcast. She would usually sleep during such a long car ride, but she is too distracted to focus on resting. She watches the city pass them with a melancholy feeling. She knows she has to come to terms with this move, but she can’t get out of her own sorrow.

Eventually the city turns to highways, and a few hours later, highways turn to suburbia. The first thing Clarke notices about Arkadia is that it’s pretty clean, much cleaner than the city, at least. At least that’s one pro to this whole disaster: no rats the size of cats. She rolls her eyes. There are no pros to this.

Driving through her new neighborhood, she notices it is relatively well off. The residents here are probably upper-middle class. All the houses they pass are at least two stories, and a lot of the driveways have basketball hoops on them. She finds it strange. Back in the city there were plenty of outdoor courts — she doesn’t get how people can play basketball on a slanted driveway.

“This is it,” Abby says.

Clarke turns her head, peering through her mother’s window, before they turn directly into the driveway. It is a nice house, yellow on the outside, with a few trees. From what she can tell, there’s even a fenced yard peeking into her line of sight.

And of course, a basketball hoop on their slanted driveway.