Craven spent the remainder of the night locked up in his room, trying to come up with some way to get out of going with his brother and becoming a criminal without ending up looking like road kill. But by eight o’clock, he still hadn’t packed anything, and he hadn’t come up with a solution either. It looked like he was screwed.
His brother knocked on his door.
“Craven! Trent and Gray are here. We’re leaving in half an hour.”
“Mom and Dad can’t be for this.”
”Well they wouldn’t be, if they knew.”
“This is kidnapping!” Craven complained as he grabbed some clothes and threw them into his backpack.
“Bring something black,” Chad told him. Craven cursed him under his breath, but almost laughed at the irony. Everything he owned was black.
When he finished packing everything he figured he would need, he left his room and crept downstairs. His parents were both still fast asleep, and he didn’t want to wake them up. If he did, it would mean trouble.
“Throw your shit in the back,” Chad said, pointing at Gray’s oversized black van.
Craven reluctantly did as he was told and threw his bag into the back and then climbed in. Chad was driving, and Gray always sat in the front, since it was his van. So Craven got stuck sitting next to the sadistic, homicidal maniac known as Trent.
The enormous man, who was shaped like a bodybuilder, took up nearly half the seat in the back, and all the headroom. Craven figured he must have been a good seven feet tall.
Gray and Chad finished loading up the last of their supplies and climbed in the front.
”Let me warn you, Cray, that you may be forced to do a few things you won’t like. But if you screw this up for us, I will kill you. Get it?”
“Got it,” Craven muttered.
“Good.” He turned back to the wheel and started the engine. Within ten minutes they were already on the highway heading east towards Ontario, Canada.
“Excuse me? We’re going where?” Merle’s mouth fell open in shock, allowing a clump of mashed potatoes to fall out.
“Close your mouth, Merle!” Her mother snapped. Merle obeyed but kept her eyes focused on her father in shock.
“Quebec,” Arthur repeated.
“Dad,” Merle argued, “I don’t know if you remember but, I failed French!”
“So what a better way to learn the language dear?”
“Dad!”
“Arthur, what is the meaning of this? We never discussed a move to Quebec!” Natalie added.
“I know honey, but the opportunity just…” he fumbled for the word, “Came up…”
Merle glared at him disbelievingly. “I don’t want to move to Quebec.” She repeated angrily.
“I know you don’t want to move to Quebec. But we don’t have much of a choice. I have the opportunity to move there and make twice what I’m making now. So I’m going to take it.”
“Don’t you think you should have talk to us first?” Merle snapped. “I don’t want to move!”
“That’s just too bad, young lady…”
“Arthur!” Natalie cut in. “Merle has a point. Why didn’t you talk to us about this?”
“It’s my job, and my family!” Arthur hissed, “We’ll move when and where I say we move. And I say that we are going to move to Quebec, next week! You’d better start packing.”
“NEXT WEEK!” Mere shrieked, bolting upright in her chair.
“That’s right,” Arthur said sternly. He got up as well and left the table.
Once he was gone, Natalie looked down at her daughter and sighed. “I wonder what has gotten into him?” She murmured. “Don’t worry, I’ll talk to him.” And then she, too, left.
It took two days of screaming, begging, door-slamming and threatening to starve herself, but Merle finally gave in and started packing her things. On Saturday they were going to pile all their really important stuff into a truck and driving it into Montreal, Quebec. The move alone was casting them a fortune. She certainly hoped her father’s ‘great new job’ was worth all of this.
She was grumbling to herself as she went through all her old tons, trying to decide what to sell, what to give away, and what to take with her. Everything had some sort of memory attached to it, and she didn’t want to part with anything. She picked up an old doll that her old neighbours had given her. She hadn’t seen them in years, and she’d never actually thought about them or her old doll before, but now the idea of leaving it was unimaginable.
The same thing happened when she saw some worn out half-soles from when she had attempted taking up dancing.
Or the bandanna her other neighbours’ dog always wore.
She hated her father for making her move. Quebec was practically a whole other country! Everyone spoke French and they hate the English-speaking population. Why, of all places, did they have to move to Quebec!?! She would have rather moved to the prairies with nothing but wheat fields as far as the eye could see. At least there wouldn’t be any dirty, creepy Frenchies!
She made plans as she packed to make Arthur Lotus’s life a living hell from that point on.
They hate me… Arthur thought miserably to himself. They all hate me…and they’ll hate me even more when they discover I don’t have a place for us to live once we get to Quebec, or a new job. He ran his hands through his sweaty dark hair and groaned. He had been sitting in front of his computer all night, looking for a decent house that would fool his family into thinking he had a new job. With the money he already had from the software he was selling, he could make a down payment, but after that…
“I’ll deal with a job later.” He grumbled. It wouldn’t be too hard for someone with his prestige and experience to get a new job in the computer industry, even in Quebec.
He continued scanning pictures of houses in residential Montreal, most of the sites were in French, but Arthur was half-French by birth, and his wife could still speak the language fairly fluently, so he managed.
“What’cha doing, dad?”
Arthur nearly leapt out of his seat and knocked over his already cold coffee.
“Merle! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” He gasped.
“Why?” Merle questioned, “What are you doing?”
She crept up to the computer and Arthur quickly turned off the monitor. Merle looked at him questioningly. “What are you hiding?”
“N-n-nothing!” He insisted.
“Yeah right dad…” Merle glared at him, but didn’t press the subject. “Something’s up.”
“Nothing is u-up, Merle.” He repeated. “Shouldn’t you be packing?” He squinted at her, still sitting in front of the computer screen.
“I finished with my closet.” She said, “And I started on packing my desk and dresser, so I thought I’d take a break.”
“Not more than five boxes, I hope, I told you we don’t…”
“We don’t have a lot of room on the truck, I know dad. I don’t have a lot of stuff anyways.” She rolled her eyes and made her way back upstairs. Arthur breathed a heavy sigh of relief and went back to house browsing.
This is the most uncomfortable situation of my life… Craven thought irritably to himself. He was currently squished between Trent and Gray, with his brother sitting in the front seat still driving.
Gray had opted to move back for more space to stretch out and sleep.
They had been driving now for two days, and had made up into Canada, and were now driving through Saskatchewan. If Trent hadn’t almost pushed his head against the pavement as they drove at a good 70 or 80 miles an hour down the road, h would have sworn they weren’t moving at all. It was if he had been looking at the same scene for the last 18 hours – a field of endless yellow wheat. He was just about ready to go insane.
“There’s a town 2 kilometres from here.” Chad announced suddenly.
“What?” Craven sat up and looked ahead of them, but there was no sign of a town, and he could see for miles.
All of a sudden, the road seemed to veer down and in three seconds flat, an entire small town was in plain view.
“Where the fuck did that place come from!?” He choked.
“I…don’t…know…” Chad gawked.
They approached the town and pulled into a gas station.
“Finally!” Craven grinned, jumping out of the van as soon as he could and digging out some money. He grabbed a coke from the gas station store and dropped it on counter.
“You take American?” He asked.
The old, weathered man behind the counter just looked at him, rolled a piece of something in his mouth and spit on the ground. “You American?” He drawled, eyeing Craven suspiciously.
“Uh…yeah…” Craven answered. “California.”
The man glared at him, “You didn’t come up here to ski, did ya?”
“Um…no sir, even if it was winter, I don’t think you could even find a place to toboggan around here.”
The man laughed and started to ring up his drink. “You’re not so bad…for an American.”
“Thanks…I think…” Craven took his coke and fled the small store as fast as he could.
“Can we get out of here?” he asked his brother as he filled the tank up. “That guy in there is crazy.”
“We’ve got some business to take care of first.” Chad said as he finished with the gas and replaced the spout.
“What do you mean?” Craven asked. He looked behind him and saw Gray and Trent standing next to the van. Gray reached inside and pulled something out of the van. It took Craven only a split second to realize what it was: a gun.
Gray pulled back the safety and started towards the gas station, Trent was close behind.
“Oh, fuck no…”
