Airstream

Okay, this is the beginning of my novel in progress. It's a young adult novel, about a teenage girl with a bi-polar mother who discovers an abandoned Airstream trailer in the woods near her house. This is as much as I'm posting. I'm already up to chapter seven. It's the best thing in the world when the story just emerges organically.

Airstream
A novel in progress


Six schools in four years. You would think that by now I’d be used to it, but you never get used to starting over. It’s true that history repeats itself, but never quite exactly.
We moved to Unity, New Hampshire when my mother decided she’d had it up to here with Vermont. She couldn’t take one more second of it, not one, so she packed up and we took off in the middle of the night. Before that, she quit the states of Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and Delaware. Actually, I was born in California, and we’ve lived in South Dakota, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Michigan. Mom says we’re peripatetic. She’s really smart and loves to throw around big words, most of which I’m curious enough to look up. Peripatetic means roaming, wandering. When things aren’t going so well I think we’re more like peripathetic, but most of the time being a nomad suits me just fine. There’s a line in my mom’s favorite poem: “We learn by going where we have to go.” I think that sums up her position- largely unfixed.
Unity isn’t as bad as some of the places we’ve lived in. It’s a small town, with a church on the green and town hall and a grange and a general store. “Archetypical quaint New England town,” was what my mom said, as we drove through in our crappy old Saturn wagon with the plastic rooftop carrier that we got at a yard sale four moves back in Virginia. “This is a good place, I can feel it in my bones.” She says this every time we move. Every time, I’m happy to believe her, but here’s one thing I’ve learned in my 14 years on this earth: belief gets more fragile every time it gets shaken.
So far I have survived Stevens High School. It’s only been one day, but I liked my English teacher, Ms. Roeper. She’s hippie-ish and young, like in her twenties. We’re reading Romeo and Juliet, one of my favorite plays of all time. I read it last year. The kids at school seem pretty standard. It’s the usual assortment of popular kids, jocks, geeky kids, losers, and juvenile delinquents. Personally, I’m none of the above. I’m a floater. That means I’m unattached and can move freely between the groups. Generally, I avoid the popular kids, because they have a tendency to be mean, but the other groups welcome us floaters. We’re nonjudgmental and potentially interesting.
The high school is around a mile from the house we’re renting. It’s a small place, within walking distance of the center of town. We’re near a laundromat and a convenience store, which works for us. Every time we uproot ourselves we find ourselves in a house with some degree of weirdness-idiosyncrasies, mom calls them, and this place was no exception. The owner or whoever rented this place before us must have had a thing about mustard yellow. Every room except for the bathroom is painted that color. The bathroom is Pepto-Bismol pink, which is probably the only color more hideous than mustard yellow. Hot water comes out of the cold water tap and vice versa. The door doesn’t open unless you pull it up, jiggle it, then twist the knob really hard to the left. The front bedroom – which is, incidentally, mine- is unheated, so I have to leave my door wide open to get any warm air in there at all. The breezeway smells like cat pee. But guess what? It’s only $350 bucks a month, and my mom got a job stocking shelves at the CVS in Claremont, right down the street from Stevens, and she also gets a ten percent discount. There’s a television and a dish. My favorite thing is the kitchen set which mom says is from the fifties. There’s a red enamel table with this teakettle design in the middle and four chrome and vinyl chairs. It’s pretty sweet.