if this is your first time reading the olivia chronicles, feel free to start from the beginning. just click on the “olivia” link in the multimedia box at the top of the sidebar to the right. enjoy!

dear dimestore therapists,

it wasn’t until i was in the passenger seat of my father’s maserati speeding down the merritt parkway that it sunk in. i had spent the better part of a month in the hospital, two weeks of which i’d been in a coma, and now i was effectively being displaced against my will.

while i was comatose, my dad, whose name is owen, had arranged for my records to be transferred out of my high school to a private school near his townhouse in new york city. without even consulting me, he’d taken my belongings out of the home i’d been in since i was six years old and put them into a strange bedroom on the upper west side of new york city. when he’d broken the news to me as we were checking out of the hospital, he was almost sheepish, as if he knew he were in for a serious tongue-lashing.

“how could you do that?!” i yelled, my voice thundering from my room down the white hallways of the hospital. my legs were still a little weak from disuse, but my vocal chords seemed to be working just fine. “did you think that i would just be so relieved that you and your trophy wife would be so kind as to take the little motherless child in–that i would jump in your car and go where ever you wanted me to?”

i don’t recall if i mentioned this before, but owen remarried just a little over a year after he left my mom and me, to a 25 year-old named ashleigh. i’d never met her, but just the fact that she was only 12 years older than me and that apparently my father loved her more than he loved my mother was enough to make me hate her. i was only sixteen, so you’ll have to forgive me for being dramatic. at the time, i didn’t realize that there’s so much more that goes into a marriage that no one on the outside could ever possibly see.

so when my father told me that i was going to be moving in with him, ashleigh, and their one year-old son, gavin, i was a little bit livid. i wanted nothing to do with his perfect wife and his perfect townhouse and his perfect son, i wanted to go home and go back to my old school and try to pretend like i was normal, even though somewhere inside i knew i’d never be able to pull off “normal” again.

just as my rant started to pick up steam, aidan walked in the door of my hospital room. i was bent over the bed, putting the last of the belongings that had accumulated in the last month in a gym bag, and owen was standing by the window, head down, hands in his pockets. the tension must have been tangible, because aidan asked if he should wait in the lobby.

“no,” i told him, ” i need to ask you something. please come in.” i zipped up my bag and sat down in the wheelchair the nurse had brought in a few minutes before. i didn’t want to be wheeled out of the hospital, but apparently it was some kind of policy. i immediately regretted sitting down, because i felt at a distinct advantage looking up at aidan and my father, who both easily cleared 6 feet.

i took a deep breath and started talking, getting straight to the point. “aidan, i want to come live with you. i don’t want to move to new york, i don’t want to leave our school, i don’t want to live with owen and his family. please, just ask your parents if i can stay with you guys until we graduate. they love me, don’t they?” i could feel myself starting to lose control and beg, so i stopped talking. the last thing i wanted to do was start bawling in front of my father, even though that was precisely what i felt like doing at the moment. i had never felt so hopeless, even when aidan had told me, on the day after i woke from my coma, that my mother was dead and i had slept through her funeral.

“livvy, i–” aidan started to say something, but he was interrupted by my father, who stepped over to aidan and put his hand up to stop him. they exchanged a look, and i felt as though i was being excluded from something. they had obviously been talking about me, and seeing this drove me crazy. i shot aidan a glare that i hoped implied that he would be in a great deal of physical pain the next time we were alone.

“i’m sorry, ollie, but this is not a negotiation. i know you don’t want to leave your school, but i am your legal guardian, and i want you with me. and it’s not “my” family. it’s your family, too. ashleigh and gavin are so excited to meet you.”

i just looked at my dad incredulously, almost pitying him for his naivete. it sounded like he thought he was putting together his very own version of the brady bunch. i wanted to scream at him, YOU DON’T GET TO BE MY FAMILY ANYMORE! YOU LEFT, REMEMBER?!

instead, i looked at aidan, silently pleading with him to step in and fix things, like he’d always done for me in the past. he’d always been the “together” half of our friendship, the one who knew how to change a flat tire and get around a new place, the one who knew what to say all the time and who could make even the bitterest old librarian at our school laugh like a child.

“i’m sorry, livvy. i tried to work things out so you could live with  me, really. but there are some things you don’t…” aidan trailed off as owen frowned and shook his head sharply. aidan drew his shoulders to his ears in a sign of regret, then mouthed “sorry” to me as owen checked the time.

“ollie, we really should get going. i don’t want to get stuck in rush hour traffic, and it’s already almost seven. are you ready?”

i looked up at aidan and owen, who both loomed over me in my wheelchair, making me feel like nothing so much as a kindergartner on her first day of school. i felt totally defeated, and i couldn’t remember a time when i’d been more angry with aidan. even on the night i’d caught him with jackie i hadn’t been so upset. i think the stress of my current situation was compounding my frustration and turning it into the blackest rage i’d ever experienced.

“don’t call me ollie,” i said, “only my family gets to call me that.” then i pushed the wheels of my chair forward, purposely rolling over aidan’s foot as i squeaked loudly out of my hospital room, leaving all my things behind.

yours,

olivia

— Alexis