Chapter Four

Taylor Hanson

I looked up at the house through my sunglasses now, trying to take in every detail of it, knowing it would be the last time I saw it for a very long time. I missed it already. I missed the feel of my own bed. I missed the sound of the crappy old television we had making crackling noises, interrupting an actor's sentences every five seconds. I missed our kitchen. I missed our bathroom. And I hadn't even left yet.

Over the next few months, all of it would be replaced with strange hotel beds or the coffin-like beds of the tour bus. Strange hotel showers, fast-food restaurants instead of a kitchen. I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling that pang again. That strange pang. That pang of something besides the old feeling of not wanting to go. The odd feeling that something was going to happen. But I didn't know what.

I shook my head, taking my eyes away from the house for the first time in what must've been ten minutes straight. I blamed the feeling on reading too many of those things about what the personality of "someone born under the star sign of Pisces" was. One of the traits most often named was that of having a sixth sense or being somewhat psychic. I didn't usually believe in things like that, but it was a cool thing to think about.

"You okay?" Isaac's voice asked from behind me as I felt a gentle hand go on my shoulder. It startled me. Not so much his sneaking up from behind me, but the way the gentleness of the hand was more cautious than sympathetic.

"Yeah," I said, glancing at the house again. "I'm just going to miss this place so much."

"Yeah, I know the feeling," he said. "But I also know we'll have a lot of fun on this tour."

"Maybe," I said. I wasn't as quick to agree as I had been a few weeks earlier. Mostly because it was all bullshit and now that I had confessed to not really wanting to go on the tour, it seemed asinine to deny it.

He sighed, much the way he had done the night I had finally told everyone my thoughts on the tour(being careful not to use any unmentionable four letter words though I had the strongest urge to) that they all practically had to beat out of me. I was honest. I told them exactly what I felt and thought. You know what your parents always used to tell you when you were little about how it's better to be honest than it is to keep it all jarred up inside? They were lying.

Everyone had looked at me with different degress of sympathy, disappointment, and frustration. I had always been the "problem traveller," as my mother had once put it. I loved it once I was doing it, but I hated the thought of it. It wasn't too rare that I would protest traveling and so everyone basically got sick of hearing it after a while. I had looked around the room at all their faces and immediately got up from the table, going upstairs, and slamming the door to the bedroom that Isaac, Zac, and I shared, leaving my birthday cake behind.

Later my father had called me downstairs for what could possibly be classified as a heart-to-heart, consisting mostly of me pacing the room and complaining to my heart's content while he sat on the couch, patiently waiting for me to stop so that he could offer advice. My father's advice was always sage, even when it had a teasing tone behind it. This time, all he had to offer was a "It's only until August." He didn't seem to understand that August was an eternity away right now.

"You don't understand," I said under my breath, shaking my head. He didn't hear me. He was already all the way across the lawn saying good-bye to some of his friends who had come to see him off. I had said good-bye to all my friends the day before. All my friends except the house.

"It's not going to burn down while we're gone, you know," Zac said. "You don't have to stare at it as if it were the last time you're seeing it."

I looked at him frankly.

"Give it up, Zac, you were looking at the house the exact same way just a little while ago. I saw you," I said, smiling at him.

He smiled back.

"You know, on days like these, it's hard to believe we complain about this house so much. The toaster doesn't work, the toilet constantly overflows, the ceiling is caving in, the roof is leaking," he said, naming off a few more of our complaints about the house. "It's like saying good-bye to someone you didn't really like in the past but you know you're going to miss anyway."

I nodded my agreement. "Yeah, it kind of is," I said. "I don't think I've ever really thought of it that way before."

"Come on, you two!" my father called to us. We looked back at him to see him closing the back of the van where everything we were bringing along with us was stuffed. Everyone else was gathered around the vehicle except for me and Zac. We sighed in unison and made our way over to where the rest of our family was standing.

"Here goes nothing," Zac whispered to me as he got into his usual seat in the van and buckled in. I sat beside him.

Everyone else piled in around us and before long, we were pulling out of the driveway for what would be the last time for months. I didn't know it then, watching our house until it was no longer visible in the horizon, but this tour was going to be the beginning of the rest of my life and that Zac was wrong.

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Index
Chapter Three
Chapter Five