Hilltop House

Cora, Two

Cora woke around four AM, somewhat unsure as to why. If she'd been dreaming, she didn't know what it'd been about, and she didn't have to go to the bathroom. But whatever the reason, she was wide awake and, after trying for about fifteen minutes to fall back to sleep, she just gave up. She was used to being up at odd hours—sort of a curse for anyone too hooked to their phone to part with it at night—but she preferred staying up late to waking up early. Sitting in bed, the girl remembered with a brief shiver that she'd moved. That this was her bed, but it wasn't her room. Well, it was her room, now. That was the sad part.

No doubt her mother had gone off to bed long ago, ready to pass out. It was one thing Cora refused to do—drink. She'd seen too many people do too many stupid things under the influence. Back at her old school, she'd hung around the wrong kids as a freshman and sophomore, the ones no parent would approve of, and it was a miracle she'd never gotten herself involved in any trouble with law enforcement, though there had been more near misses than she could count. Almost everyone she'd hung out with had gotten caught doing something illegal at some point; she had never actually done anything illegal, but she'd certainly put herself in some precarious situations. When one of her idiot acquaintances did something really terrible and almost involved her, she'd made the wise decision to cut most of her ties and instead focus on herself moving into junior year.

She wasn't as rash and impetuous as her mother thought she was. Her grades alone revealed that. In fact, Cora was pretty sure the only reason her mother wasn't as hard on her as she might've otherwise been was that Cora had always maintained straight A's. Even when she'd entirely transitioned away from all the friends of her early high school years, she'd kept up with school and never fallen into any sort of slump. It'd helped that Ben had started to pay attention to her around that time.

They'd been in one another's circles since sophomore year, she and Ben, but they'd never talked much one-on-one. For Cora's part, she'd found Ben far too intimidating to approach. He was tall and slender and had all these sort of punk rock vibes going, and he was super confident. That was the most attractive thing about him. He'd been the most difficult person to leave behind when she'd decided to break away from her hazardous crowd, but then, to her surprise, he'd slowly but surely followed her rather than stick with them, and just before she'd heard she was moving, he'd finally told her how he felt when the two of them were at that stupid Fourth of July carnival. If Cora had known how little time she'd have had with him, she would've tried to speed things up.

She shivered, felt suddenly slightly awkward and adjusted her pajama shorts so they didn't ride up quite so much. The room was dark. With just those two small windows facing the wall beyond, there wasn't much chance for moonlight to sneak in. Cora reached for the phone she'd left charging on the windowsill and saw a few messages, all from Ben. Smiling inadvertently, she swiped through them: "You make it, beautiful?" "Bad as you thought?" "Kind of worried. LMK."

"Made it. Miss you," she replied, keeping it simple. Then she decided to add a pouty selfie, which she did. He could see just how cute and miserable and disheveled she looked in her pajama tank in the middle of the night all by herself. The minute she sent it, though, she felt stupid. What was the point, anyway? It wasn't as if he was ever going to come visit her. Oh, they'd talked a big game about traveling to see one another and trying to move to the same town when they graduated, she to go to college and he to try to make it with his band. Ben had no intentions of going to school after school (that was how he put it, anyway). But whatever their words, Cora knew that the likelihood of them making anything work was pretty slim. The move had been a big one--they were at least two days' drive apart, she on the east coast now, and he in the midwest, and he'd be heading into his senior year doing all the things she was supposed to be doing while she herself was starting all over again with people that wouldn't care at all about her. It was just all so . . . so impossible. So meaningless.