Go Around

Kennedy was in the car with her mom, her windows rolled up because it was about 50 degrees, which was too cold for Kennedy. Her mother was driving a UHAL to take all of their stuff back to Maryland with them. “Are you excited to be moving back?” her mother asked, trying to make conversation. Lorelei, her mother, knew that it was all her fault and that she wouldn’t have hurt as many people as she did if her mother had just stayed in one place and hadn’t followed a man, again.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. She wasn’t sure about how the guys were going to react when, one day, low and behold she shows up at their school. They probably hated her – she would hate her, too, if she were them.
She rested her head on the window and stared at the road as it passed by at 60 mph.
Her mom nodded. She understood that Kennedy didn’t want to talk and all she wanted to do was get there and do something… normal. Before she and Alex hooked up and fell in love with each other.
Rob, her mom’s ex-fiancé, had apparently turned out to be a not-so-nice guy. He hit Lorelei a few times and eventually she got fed up with him, their arguments, and his temper so one day, last night, she packed up all of hers and Kennedy’s things and ordered a UHAL truck for today. That was about the extent of it.
They’d been driving for a while and Kennedy was pretty sure that they were almost there now.
Kennedy had somehow maintained who she was before she moved; she was still outgoing, she loved to drink, go to parties, and have sex, which she had copious amounts of, and she still dressed the same. The only thing New York culture got a hold of her on was her hair. Before she moved it had been around the length of her waist, now she wore it straight most of the time and it came almost to her collar bone.
“We’re almost there,” her mother commented and Kennedy nodded and sunk lower into her seat.
She didn’t know if she wanted to move back – when she first moved away from Maryland she had been devastated because she didn’t want to be away from Alex, but when she actually got to New York, she loved it, and remembered everything she loved about it. She would always be a new yorker because New York was her home, not Maryland. A few things had gone right when she moved to New York, for starters she made friends, not guy friends which were the friends she usually made, but she made girl friends who actually liked her.
It was such a foreign concept to her that girls would like her that when they tried being her friends she had her guard up for a very long time.
For another thing she didn’t have one single relationship while she was in New York. Besides having sex, she wasn’t with anybody and that was a good thing. Several people asked her out because she was ‘the shiny new toy’ but she always turned them down because, truth be told, she was still so in love with Alex that being with anybody would have been unnatural and she didn’t think that she’d really like it that much.
She was debating whether or not she wanted to go and visit Alex and Jack or if she would just let them see her at school one day, walking in the halls. She was probably going to go with the later because she didn’t think she had big enough balls to actually go and see Jack and Alex, the people she’d hurt the most and missed more than they probably missed her.
They were in the suburbs of Baltimore and Kennedy started searching, trying to figure out just where exactly they were so that she could see how close to Jack or Alex her house would be. She recognized the street, that was a good sign.
Her mother pulled up in front of a new house and it was big, but not as big as her last house here had been. Kennedy looked at it from the window shield then got out of the car and stood by her mother’s side, “We’re starting over,” Lorelei said, wrapping her arm around Kennedy’s shoulders and shaking her a bit.
“Again,” Kennedy said and Lorelei laughed along with her.
“Shall we go look at the house?” her mother asked and grabbed the keys out of her pocket. Kennedy followed behind her and looked at the house. She twisted and twirled and examined and everything seemed to be perfect. She and her mom didn’t need a big house so this would be just perfect, but it wasn’t small by any means.
“Mom, I have somewhere I have to go. Can I come home later?” she asked Lorelei, not looking at her.
“Sure, honey, whatever you want,” her mom said and started drawing out on a piece of printer paper where everything was going to go.
Kennedy grabbed her purse and walked out the door.