Halfway There | COMPLETE ✔ + Sequel

Chapter 00 - Before

This book is dedicated to all of those who thought this book was good even when it was bad.

I was sixteen years old on the worse day of my life.

Most of the time the only awful thing that happens to people that age is never something that exceeds a bad haircut. I guess I was just one of the "lucky" ones because it seems that most people get to live at least half of a lifetime before something even remotely traumatizing happens to them.

Now most people can recognize the difference between a painful memory and a good one. Most are able to find ways of either coping with it or, my personal favorite, suppressing it. And even though I try to push that memory into the farthest and darkest parts of my brain I remember, vividly, the first time I genuinely felt as if the world stood still.

"Everything is fine. He'll be home soon." I remember thinking those words repeatedly in my head, hoping that if I thought it hard enough that somehow they would end up ringing true. It was like my own personal take of "There is no place like home."

It was the 15th of December. I remember because my mother kept this hideous brown clock in our living room that would also tell you the date. I had looked up at it enough times that night that I knew right away that I would learn to hate that date before I knew what it meant.

My father was a firefighter and earlier that day a fire had broke out in an apartment building just a few blocks from the center of town. It was the first serious fire in years. I only knew it was bad because my mom was pacing back and forth in the middle of the living room, biting her nails as she walked. This alone should be enough to explain how nerve racking the waiting actually was because anyone that knew my mother knew that she had always made it a point to make herself look pristine at all times, her nails were no exception.

I snapped at her that night. When I had grown tired of listening to the way her slippers slapped against the rug I demanded she take a seat. "You pacing that way isn't going to make time go by any faster." She responded only by shooting daggers in my direction and continued to pace.

I genuinely wouldn't know what to tell anyone if they asked how long we stayed that way, just waiting for something to happen. It had been hours since we had last heard anything and watching the live feed on the News only made it worse - they tended to exaggerate situations.

She continued to pace in front of the fireplace and I stared at the ugly brown clock as it blinked an annoying, neon red color. Our anxiety hung in the air, obvious and loud, but neither one of us addressed it.

If I am being honest with myself I'm not entirely sure what we had been waiting for to begin with. Had we been waiting on a phone call? The doorbell? For him to come walking through the door? All I knew is that we both needed something, anything really. Some kind of confirmation that he was alright and our unease was pointless.

And truth be told we had no reason to worry. He had helped neighboring towns and cities with their fires before. He was a firefighter since I was 2 years old and put out more of them than the amount of years he was alive. But this... this feeling that my mom and I both felt only an hour after he left... this was different.

So we did the only thing that we could do – we waited. My mother paced the living room floor leaving a trail of bitten off nails on the path she walked on and I made plans to burn the clock in the fireplace the next time I was alone... and we waited some more.

The funny thing about waiting for something that you aren't even sure will ever come is that your mind begins to play tricks on you. It comes up with every single wild scenario that your imagination is even remotely capable of and you begin to lose your mind when you start to lose your sense of time.