TAKE 2! Or more like 222. Because this is such a slow process for me, I focused mostly on adding description to ground the reader. Am I at least on the right track? Any and all comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated, because I am beyond ready to rip my hair out. 
We all thought we knew the reason Dad decided to move. Dad probably did, too.
CHAPTER 1
Waterfalls. One more thing to add to the list of stuff I may never experience again.
Clair’s pool, lying on a towel in the sun with her.
The ocean. Burying my toes in the sand at the beach.
Not that any of it had happened anytime recently, but it would’ve again eventually. I’d hoped.
The summer exploration program at the college. Months of just trying to get Dad to look into it and he’d finally signed me up.
Breathe… There wasn’t much point in thinking about it anymore. Eighteen hundred miles down, only a few to go.
The rain had slowed to only beads of water that gathered on the windshield, the heated leather under my legs doing little to comfort me on the raw night.
I scraped at the last flakes of purple on my nails, the intermittent squeak of the wipers about to do in my attempt to read in the dark cab of the U-Haul.
One Thousand Reasons.
Clair’s mother, Mom’s best friend, gave me the book just before we left in an effort to help me understand why things kept happening the way they did. She, somehow, still believed that everything happened for a reason.
'Our worst moments are often our most defining.'
A dead mother, a barely-there father, an almost complete lack of friends. I could identify with that.
Josh, being the oldest and “Mr. Responsible”, led up ahead in Dad’s car. Bobby, ignorantly oblivious that he was the cause of all of this, followed in the one the two of them shared.
Still over a year away from getting my license, I got the passenger seat in the cab of the truck with Dad behind them.
Almost a decade and a half of memories was now just that. Memories. Though there hadn’t been many good ones the past few years.
No one said it would be easy, Dad had said. I didn’t ask for easy, just manageable. I felt like I’d treaded water in an ocean without shores for too long and the buoy that finally came into sight was ripped away—like God said
psych.
'Hardships develop our strengths. We don’t truly know ourselves, or our potential, until we’ve been tested.'
If there really was a bigger picture, I was definitely being tested.
“In one mile, turn right,” the automated voice of the GPS said.
The road was dark, desolate. A grim sign of what was to come.
I turned the heat up a notch in an ongoing battle with Dad over an agreeable temperature.
“I saw that,” he said, a smile in his tone as his eyes never shifted from the road.
Of course he did. It was the same thing he said every time, right before he stealthily turned it back down.
He’d put in extra effort the whole trip to try to keep the mood as light as possible to make up for the massive jolt to our lives.
Honestly, three years of working my way back up, only for this to happen.
'God doesn’t—'
Tires screeched. A deer glowed in Josh’s high beams.
It leapt out of the way and disappeared into the black, but Bobby missed the beat. He plowed into Josh with a bang.
My book flew from my lap as Dad slammed on the brakes, and the seatbelt bit into my chest.
Bobby fishtailed.
The smell of burnt rubber blitzed my nose as I gripped the seat and the over head handle bar. Bobby’s brake lights disappeared as his back end went off the road into a ditch.
No, no, no, no. Tires hollering, we slid toward him.
Oh, God, no. I squeezed my eyes shut. I’d deny relation if I could but didn’t want him to die.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. My head whipped forward as we jarred to a stop.
A cloud of white eclipsed our view. As it dissipated, Bobby shone in our headlights.
Holy Christ. Fifteen more feet and we would’ve hit him, smack dab in the middle of his driver’s side door.
Steam billowed from his hood.
“God dammit!” Dad’s knuckles were white around the steering wheel. “Are you okay?” He looked to me with an utterly justified look of alarm.
I nodded, Josh sideways on the road up ahead, and Dad heaved open his door and lunged from the truck.
Ducking from the drizzle, he made a beeline for Bobby. He must’ve seen he was okay, he raised a finger to him to wait and rushed to his own car that Josh drove. He ripped the driver’s side door open and invaded the space between Josh and the steering wheel.
Dear God, please. Not again.
Dad’s mouth moved as if talking.
He lifted out of the car and his hands went to his hips as he inhaled a chest-expanding breath.
I let out the one I was holding and reached for my door handle. I dropped to the ground from the high seat as Bobby also got out.
Josh got out of Dad’s car as we converged on him.
“What the hell was that?” Bobby’s eyes bulged.
“Did you not see the deer?” Josh shouted.
“So you had to jack up on your friggin’ brakes?”
Josh shook. “Are you okay?” I needed to make sure.
He sucked in a breath and nodded.
“Friggin’ idiot,” Bobby said.
Seriously? “Were you even paying attention?” I asked Bobby, hugging myself as I shivered. Despite my loathing for him—as well the fact he’d only had his license a few months—I couldn’t deny that he was actually a pretty good driver. There’d been plenty of space between them. He should’ve had enough to time to stop.
“Shut your hole, Meg. Go get back in the truck.”
“Enough,” Dad said, probably just grateful we didn’t hit either of them.
I turned to the boys’ car. There wasn’t any damage to the frame, but steam still forced its way through the seams of the hood and green fluid trickled onto the ground from underneath it.
Dad stood with his hands on his hips again as he surveyed the damage.
“What the hell are we gonna do now?” Bobby asked, glaring at the wrecked vehicle that would’ve provided him his best escape from his “intolerable” family.
Dad lifted a palm to fend him off. “Bob, just relax a minute.”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Josh apologized. “I really didn’t mean—”
“It was a natural response, Josh. It’s not your fault.”
“Like hell, it’s not,” Bobby said. “Thanks to him, now we’re out our friggin’ ride.
Idiot.”
“Robert…” Dad took in a breath. “Why don’t you go wait in the truck.”
“Fine by me.” He started walking.
“Megan, go with him,” he said to me a little softer. “There’s no point in you standing out here in the rain.”
It was dark and late and I was already glazed from the mist, if I stood there any longer it would soak in. So I, too, turned back for the U-Haul that carried our entire existence.
Bobby stole my seat, so I hoisted up and in from the driver’s side and took up position next to him in the middle.
“It could’ve been worse,” I said, pulling my sweatshirt from the floor and draping it over me. “At least no one got hurt.” We certainly knew something about that.
“Yeah. Good thing.”
Such a jerk. As Bobby, in his royal blue t-shirt a size too big and his dusky hair barely damp, reached for the knob for the heat, Dad, with Josh quivering from the cold next to him, pulled out his cell phone.
“Do you really think Dad’s not gonna smell you?” I asked as I scraped my own soggy mess to the back of my head. He reeked of pot, and if Dad hadn’t already, he surely would.
“Drink bleach, Meg.”
“It wasn’t his fault, you know.” I secured my skimpy ponytail with the elastic from my wrist.
“Oh, it wasn’t? It was necessary for him to almost kill his entire family over a friggin’ animal? Oh, I’m sorry. What’s left of his family?”
He really made my head spin. “It’s called compassion,” I said. “Maybe you could try having a little. Besides, it was apparently just as necessary for you to get high.”
“Shut up.”
“So, what, were you taking a hit, not paying attention?”
Bobby shook his head at the windshield with the same disgruntled squint of his eyes. “Seriously, Meg, shut the f**k up.”
“I’m not gonna shut up. You ruined my life.” Josh, the non-guilty party, still stood outside, drops forming on the ends of his hair.
Bobby gasped. “I ruined your life?
What life? And get it straight. I’m not the reason we’re here. We’re here because Dad was sick of finding dead kids.”
“Yeah, and he didn’t want you being one of them. Do you not get that?”
He huffed.
Dad finished his call and stepped over to the car in the ditch, its front wheels on the pavement, rear wheels off the road at a forty-five-degree angle. He opened the driver’s side door and leaned in, his arm going directly under the seat.
He apparently didn’t find what he looked for, so he got in and reached for the glove box.
He re-emerged and started for the truck.
Bobby didn’t react.
Dad’s contentment from minutes before as we crossed the line into the county decayed, and the gauzy skin of his face showed deep lines of disgust as he pulled open the door and lifted a half-smoked joint and full baggy of marijuana into view.
Bobby’s thin blue irises remained forward.
“We’re not there yet, Bob.” Dad was composed, but it was clear he struggled. “I meant what I said. You have seven more miles to wash yourself of this. Going from big-city commissioner to small-town chief, I’m going from never around to always around. I assure you I am not someone you want to be stuck in the house with.”
Bobby’s view stayed fastened out the windshield.
“Get out of the truck,” Dad said. “You wait in the rain.”
