Chapter Text
Three familiar heaps of metal rattled up a sun-bleached Reefside street and turned into a cracked driveway: Mike’s pickup first, Frankie’s sedan hugging its bumper, and Axl’s beat-to-hell car coughing like it might quit out of spite.
The house squatted low and beige with a shallow porch and a narrow picture window. Inside, the floor plan felt uncannily familiar: living room front and center, hallway running past a cramped kitchen to the bedrooms. If you squinted, it was Orson with palm trees.
Frankie popped her door and clapped, already juggling a clipboard and a box labeled KITCHEN—MAYBE in Sharpie. “Alright, team! New town, new chances, same family—let’s go!”
Sue unfolded herself from the back seat of the sedan with her phone glued to her ear. “Carly, oh my gosh, it looks exactly like our old house, but… coastal? Should I reinvent myself? Like, New Sue, West Coast Edition—”
“Sue, honey, carry something while you reinvent,” Frankie said, hip-checking the screen door open.
“Carrying!” Sue chirped, tucking the phone to her shoulder. “I’m totally carrying. Carrying.” She grabbed a lamp and wobbled toward the porch. “Carly, I’ll call you back! Unless… okay, I’m hanging up now!”
Mike had already stepped down from the pickup with two heavy boxes, one tucked under each arm, wordlessly heading for the door. He paused just long enough to glance at the front step, testing the sag with his boot heel, then grunted in satisfaction and kept going.
Brick slid off the truck bed, making his way into the house, a paperback already open in one hand and a scuffed box under the other. “This is the same… just different,” he observed, flat as if he were reading the sentence. Then softer, almost reflexive: “Different.”
Frankie swept in behind him, setting her box on the living room carpet. The place smelled like dust and someone else’s lemon cleaner. She pivoted like a field general. “Okay! Living room boxes here, kitchen boxes in the kitchen, bedroom boxes down the hall. Easy. Organized! We can do this!”
Axl sauntered in last, sunglasses still on even though the living room was more dim than bright. He hauled one box from his car and set it by the doorway with theatrical care. Then he dropped onto the couch like a felled tree and pulled out his phone.
“Axl,” Frankie warned without turning, as if her spine had eyes. “Up. Boxes.”
“I am up,” he said, thumbs already skating the screen.
Brick edged past with his own smaller box, brow lifting at the sight of Axl sprawling, and asked, “Why do I have to keep helping if he doesn’t?" a beat passed, "doesn't,” setting the box down with a thump.
“Because we’re a family,” Mike said, reappearing with more cardboard. He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to. “And because the boxes won’t walk themselves.”
“Yes,” Frankie added, pointing down the hall like an air-traffic controller. “Boxes. Hall. Now.”
Sue clattered in behind them with the lamp and a precarious stack of picture frames. “Do you think Reefside High will like me? Should I go by Susan? Is that more… coastal?” She caught Frankie’s look and immediately pivoted. “Carrying now, less talking! Carrying!”
They made a lopsided parade through the front room. The kitchen swallowed boxes until the counters disappeared. The living room collected a chaotic tower of MISC, PROBABLY LIVING ROOM, and WHY DO WE OWN THIS. Down the hall, three doors waited: one for Axl, one for Sue, one for Brick.
Axl drifted that way at last, dragging two boxes and nudging open the first bedroom with his shoulder. He took one glance around—slightly bigger than the others, window facing the street, closet that didn’t stick—and set his boxes down with a satisfied nod. “Called it,” he announced to no one in particular.
“Oldest gets the bigger room,” Mike said from behind him, as if stamping it with official approval. “Comes with older-brother responsibilities.”
Brick drifted to the next bedroom down, set his box inside, and immediately lined three paperbacks along the sill like they might anchor him there. “I’m unpacking my books,” he reported, calm as a weather forecast. Then, whispered: “Books.”
“Perfect!” Frankie said, appearing in the hall like she’d teleported there on a cloud of stress. “Everyone, ten minutes to get your rooms started, then we regroup to do the kitchen. We will not be eating dinner off a moving blanket. We will not!”
Sue disappeared into her room to debate which posters said “approachable” without screaming “desperate.” Mike moved like a metronome—truck, doorway, hallway, bedroom—carrying weight as if that were the only part of moving that made sense.
Axl shut his door with his foot, dropped onto the bare mattress, and let the air sigh out of him. The springs croaked under his shoulder blades. The room was a blank: beige walls, dusty blinds, the sound of his family clattering in and out like the ocean in a shell.
He pulled out his phone again. His thumb drifted without permission to an app he should’ve deleted. A photo flashed to full screen: Sean, laughing at something just out of frame, arm slung around a girl Axl didn’t recognize. Her caption had about a hundred hearts. His stomach did a slow, stupid roll.
He stared too long. Then he flipped the phone face-down on the mattress like he could smother what it did to him.
Boxes waited, smug and square. He didn’t touch them.
Footsteps in the hall. No knock—just Frankie, shoulder first through his door with two hangers hooked on a finger and a smile that had frayed into something brittle.
“Status report,” she said, scanning the room. Her face stalled at the sight of the untouched boxes. “Seriously?”
Axl propped himself on his elbows. “I was going to start with ‘vibes’ and then move to ‘sheets.’ It’s a system.”
“A system,” Frankie repeated, and on another day she might’ve laughed. Today she didn’t. “Do you even care how much work this is? Your father’s wearing a path in the hallway. Sue’s doing that thing where she talks herself into a panic while she tangles a lamp cord for twenty minutes. Brick is alphabetizing by author and color. And you—”
“Are also here,” Axl said. It came out lazier than he meant.
Frankie’s expression hardened by degrees. “You’re lazy, Axl. You are. You lie there and make jokes, and do the bare minimum. I am tired of carrying your part and then some.”
He sat up all the way, heat rising behind his ears.
“You’re the oldest,” she pressed on, words gathering speed now that they’d started. “You should be setting an example. You should be the one I can lean on. Instead, every time I look, you’re… nothing’s done, and there’s always an excuse, and I don’t know how we got here with you.”
“Wow,” Axl said. The word was paper-thin.
“I mean it,” Frankie said, and then the part she didn’t mean slipped out anyway. “Sometimes I honestly don’t know where we went wrong. You could be so much more if you’d just try, but you don’t. You just don’t. And I—”
Her voice hit the wall of silence his face made. In the hallway, Sue paused, clutching a stack of T-shirts. Mike stopped mid-step with a box balanced on his thigh. Brick looked up from his doorway, eyes narrowing a fraction as if he were reading a word he didn’t like.
Axl slid off the mattress, phone in his fist. “I got it,” he said, too calm. “I’m a disappointment. Message received.”
“Axl—” Frankie’s tone buckled, but he was already moving, shouldering past her into the hall.
Mike shifted like he might say something, then didn’t. Sue took half a step after Axl and stopped. Brick’s mouth opened, closed, then he said, “I’m going to put my books away.” A beat. “Away.”
The front door sounded different in this house—lighter wood, higher hinge—but the slam was the same as the one in Orson. It rattled the picture window and carried down the quiet street.
Frankie stood in the doorway of Axl’s room with her hands still raised like she could gather the sentence back out of the air. She let them fall, pressing her lips together until they went white. Mike set the box down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Sue hugged the T-shirts tighter to her chest, eyes round and skittish.
Down the hall, Brick lifted his paperback, then—after a long second—set it back down without reading.
The evening outside had gone soft and gold, the kind of light that made even cracked sidewalks look cinematic. Axl jammed his hands into his hoodie pocket and cut left at the end of the driveway, not walking toward anything in particular—just away.
He passed the last of the houses—mailboxes dented, lawns patchy but optimistic—and followed a narrow path where the neighborhood bled into a stand of pines. The air cooled as he went, sap and loam edging out the thin smell of car exhaust and new paint. He kept walking until the street noise thinned to the hush of wind in needles and the grit of dirt under his sneakers.
He didn’t have a destination. He had a direction: quieter.
The path kinked and dropped, following the curve of a dry creek bed. Branches stitched the sky together overhead. The light down here was already sliding toward dusk, long and slanted.
Axl let his shoulders unclench one notch at a time. He wasn’t going to unpack. He wasn’t going to talk. He wasn’t going to turn around and pretend the word wrong hadn’t found a place to stick in his ribs. He just kept going, letting the green tuck around him like a secret.
Somewhere ahead, between the dark of the trees and the last warm smear of sun, the ground fell away toward rock. He couldn’t see it yet. But he would.
He stepped off the paved trail onto a thinner one that barely deserved the name, the kind you find because your feet need it. The noise of the street was gone now. Only the hush of water he couldn’t quite place.
He followed it.