UnHappyMess

Alex Prior blamed his mother for having to be 39,000 feet in the air. Maybe he could’ve been more mentally prepared to get on an airplane if he had had more than a month to digest the idea of moving to another country.

His left foot vibrated at warp speed, thrumming against his seat’s armrest as well as the floor. Looking out the oval window provided only a satisfactory distraction from his uneasiness of being up so high, but peering out at the miniscule view of New Orleans was managing to kindle some nostalgia.

The August sunlight found its way out from behind the clouds, so Alex pulled back and lowered the white shade down halfway, then relaxed into his seat to try and reminisce without the distant view of The Big Easy.

He had spent much of June and July in voluntary solitary: lazy afternoons traversing the Bayou; early mornings meandering through Bourbon street; late nights wandering back and forth on the Crescent City Connection. He did feel lonely, but he’d rather that than the usual company.

Apart from the sublime locales of New Orleans, there wasn’t much Alex was going to miss about his old home. He knew a lot of people back in his old high school and a lot of people knew him, but no one genuinely knew him — certainly not outside of his bigwig basketball persona.

“Don’t do that.”

Alex lolled his head to the left to glower at his father, who’s ephemeral placement of his hand atop Alex’s kneecap was enough to quell his son’s hysteric leg shudders.

Grayson Prior was a burly man with a bushy beard that stretched past that base of his neck. His penny pigment was the same as Alex’s, but unlike his son’s curly frohawk, Grayson paraded his smooth scalp like a pearl in an oyster.

“You won’t have good fortune if you do that,” Grayson continued. He wasn’t looking at Alex, but skimming through a blue folder of documents. He’d spent much of July finalizing the preparations for relocation of his business — Prior’s Hardware Priorities — which was set to re-open in about a week.

“Tell me why we’re moving,” Alex demanded.

Grayson at last looked up from the folder. “I told you, Lex. Business is getting slow.”

“But I talked to Harry, and he said business was fine.”

“Maybe, but..it could be better. And we can do that in a new place.”

“Dad.”

“Alex.”

“Father.” Grayson flinched. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I...I’m not lying,” Grayson stammered. “The move is a business decision. Nothing else.”

Grayson wasn’t the best liar, it was always obvious to Alex, but he let his father’s resistance to letting the truth out, pass for now. It was probably more denial on his end anyway, Alex figured. Neither he or his father were on speaking terms with Julia — Alex’s mother and Grayson’s in-progress ex-wife, and Garrett — Alex’s uncle and Grayson’s disowned older brother — and Alex couldn’t blame him at all for his declination about the situation, and hardly ever mentioning their names around him.

On occasion though, Grayson was cornered into speaking to Julia whenever their lawyers called them in to continue settling their dispute. At least child custody had been the first thing sorted out between the two, and Julia had the civility and benevolence to let Alex live with his father. It might have been the only thing alleviating the toll the broken relationship was taking on Grayson.

Alex asked, “can you at least tell me where in Vancouver we’re moving to?”

“Did I not tell you that yet? Oh, ship.” Grayson was neither fond nor accepting of foul language, so his brain was prone to conceiving replacement words whenever he felt impassioned. “My bad, Lex. Must’ve been way more preoccupied with the move than I thought. Riviam Point, that’ll be our new home.”

In the seat behind Alex, a five or six or seven year-old began to wail at the approach of some turbulence, so Alex clamped a hand over one of his ears to try and block out some of the noise. “What did you-? I thought you said-? What?”

Without looking up, one of Grayson’s hands left the blue folder and drifted up to cup the back of Alex’s head, pulling him in part-way towards him. “Riv-ee-am POINT. You know it?”

Alex knocked his father’s hand away. “I’ve heard of it.” It was likely Grayson hadn’t noticed Alex’s keyed up expression, but the man also had a knack for noticing things in peripheral vision. It always made it difficult for Alex to sneak a second piece of any assorted dessert that Grayson often brought home from the bakery shop — another inanimate piece of New Orleans he would miss — nearby Prior’s Hardware Priorities. “But why there?”

“Why not there?”

“...I don’t know. It’s just...”

Grayson didn’t need his keen circumferential vision to notice the apprehension his son was transmitting. “What, you heard something bad about that place?”

“No.”

“Some nasty rumours about the townspeople? Unlucky business prospects?”

“No.”

“Someone you’re trying to avoid or something?”

Alex opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and closed it once more before ultimately turning his head back to his shaded window. “...no.”

As far as Grayson knew, Alex hardly ever lied, but when he did he wasn’t especially good at it. “You expecting anybody from Well-Ridge Prep to be there?”

“No.”

It took three years for Alex to realize that Well-Ridge Preparatory Academy had actually been draining him of his vigor to live his teenage life rather than stimulating it. The issue lied more in the people that also attended the school than it did anything else. Up until May, Alex had never physically been alone, but that didn’t prevent him from feeling alone. The last two months had indeed been encompassed by tangible loneliness, but it had been filled with untroubled solitude, too.

“Look, I don’t know anything about that place!” Alex went on. “And shouldn’t that be enough of a reason not to move our whole lives there?”

Grayson closed the folder. “I know this is a big change Lex, I’m scared too-”

“I’m not scared.”

Grayson cracked an frugal smile, but underneath it he wasn’t at all swayed by his son’s newly acquired bravado. It was denial, Grayson was sure of it. From quitting the basketball team to spending the last two months isolated from other people, Alex hadn’t been the same for a while, not since the fallout with Julia and Garrett. And though Alex had never brought up the issue ever since, Grayson knew there had to be anger, or sadness, or something his son was burying beneath his glaring neutrality.

“Well I wish I had the same spirit. In four hours we’ll be in B.C., in a new town. We’re gonna have to make new friends, both of us. You’ll be starting at a new school in the fall. I’ll have to be on the lookout for new regulars at the shop. Oh, and one of us is going to have to find time to stake out a new bakery place-”

“Are you trying to scare me?”

“I’m trying to cheer you up.”

“I told you I was fine.”

“Actually, what you said was that you weren’t scared.”

Alex pressed his lips together and said nothing more. Against his better judgement, he threw open the shade and glued his eyes to the window again. A lot more clouds had materialized hindering the sunlight, but it also diminished the imposing view of New Orleans from the sky that he previously had.

Maybe it was for the best, he thought. Grayson did have a point. In a couple of hours they’d be landing and on the road to starting a new life. His old life was exactly that — old and in the past, and he wasn’t exactly keen on going back to live it anyway.

“Try not to look down,” Grayson commented. He tucked the folder away into the seat pouch in front of him and peeked back and forth down the narrow walkway next to his seat, on the lookout for an attendant, hopefully pushing a cart filled with drinks.

Alex refrained from looking at him. “Dad.”

“I’m not teasing you this time! I even reminded you before we boarded, ‘don’t look down’.” An attendant in a grey suit vest and matching dress pants appeared at the head of the walkway, and Grayson eagerly waved them over. “Want anything?” he asked Alex when the attendant at last made it to their aisle. Alex stayed silent and waved ‘no’.

“...I can’t help it,” Alex whispered to himself over the slapdash slurping of Grayson and his cup of iced tea.

Although he knew had to accept it, staring at the faraway sights of a State he once knew, from an aircraft cruising at 39,000 feet in the sky, seemed like a more bearable option for him than moving to an unheard of town that was right next to a high-rise-infested city where he would finally meet...Her.

Would he meet her? It was a stupid question. Riviam Point was her hometown. Of course he was inevitably going to cross paths with Carsyn Mitchell.