Hilltop House

Cora, Three

Spending some of the day with her mother wasn't the worst in the world. They'd driven halfway across the country together, hadn't they? So Cora had grown used to just sitting there, listening to her music, not paying attention to the woman. The high school had been . . . a high school. Literally nothing special or different about it, except that it'd looked small. In fact, it'd looked about half the size of her other school, which had been in a somewhat more populated area. That didn't bode well. Cora wouldn't be able to disappear as easily as she'd hoped; these were probably people that all knew one another, that'd all grown up together. No doubt they were all pretty much the same, and she'd stick out. Not that sticking out bothered her, necessarily; it just sort of depended . . . she'd had Ben back home, and there were quite a few eccentric others. Here, people just seemed . . . different.

At least it was her last year. She'd just get through it and go on to college. In spite of what her mother thought, Cora had plans; she just didn't talk about them.

She was going to go into some sort of medicine, preferably something like forensic medicine. She'd had good enough math and science grades, and she'd also done really well on last year's standardized tests. The whole forensic aspect fed into Cora's morbid interests, and she knew she was smart enough for the doctor piece, so for the past year, with the help of a particularly efficient counselor at her old school with whom she still kept in touch, she'd been looking into universities and scholarships.

But she didn't tell her mother those things. No, that woman could go on thinking whatever she wanted about her delinquent daughter.

It was her mother's own fault if they didn't share any bond. Cora had been perfectly happy living with her grandmother. Sure, she'd wondered as a kid where her parents were, and the old woman had told her every time she'd asked, that "Your father's dead, and your mother's working through some things." There'd never been more than that. Never any explanation of what the "things" were that her mother had been working through, although as she'd grown older, Cora had assumed it'd been some sort of addiction, drugs or alcohol. Her mother had probably resided in some home undergoing some program, getting help. Little girl Cora had looked forward to the moment her mother would be well again and would come take her back, but once it had actually, finally happened, she'd been nothing short of devastated.

Grandma Luce had been kooky and sometimes annoyingly gruff, but she'd offered Cora safety and adventure, love and companionship. The old woman hadn't been particularly motherly. She'd never cared about dressing up little Cora or taking her to playgrounds or reading bedtime stories to her, for example, and she'd been a terrible cook. They'd ordered take-out or microwaved their dinners most nights, would sit in front of the television, her grandmother in her kimono-esque robe, with their little TV trays and their crap food, watch reruns of whatever soap the old woman was into at the moment. Birthdays and Christmases were strange but somehow magical, with Grandma Luce finding treasures within her own home to regift (a practice which Cora hadn't realized until about the age of ten). The woman had also been a terrible driver, so Cora had learned to take the bus and walk everywhere at a young age, knowing her grandmother wouldn't (and shouldn't) get behind the wheel unless absolutely necessary. Since Grandma Luce's house had been in a neighborhood with other houses just like it (big and old and full of mystery) though better taken care of, Cora never minded walking.

But her mother preferred to drive just about everywhere. The past few years, ever since Cora had been taken from what she felt to be her home, her mother had refused to let her walk most places and was even hesitant to let her bike anywhere on her own.

Cora had always figured it'd been because of her preferences and hobbies, not to mention the wayward friends she'd had in middle school and those first couple years of high school. But things were different, now . . . they'd moved, Cora wasn't anywhere near those people (hadn't been for a long time, though her mother hadn't really known that). She wasn't a danger to herself or anyone else. At the very least with this move, Cora had hoped she'd gain a little freedom, perhaps even a bit more of her mother's trust, even . . . a car of her own? Those hopes had quickly dwindled after the short trip they'd taken to the high school that morning.