The Heart Will Lead You Home Read online

  Ed yawned. It had been a long, hard day, and he imagined that the next few days were only going to get harder. As he drifted off to sleep, he wondered again how long Lizzie would hold her grudge against him.

  Chapter Two

  They rounded the bend in the mid-morning sunlight and Lizzie spotted the perky wooden sign that read:

  Welcome to Edenville

  “Our little slice of heaven!”

  She heard herself groan and she rolled her eyes. This had to be the lamest town they’d ridden through since they’d started darting through little hole-in-the-wall towns earlier that morning. Then the name on the sign registered in her brain, and she let out a little whimper.

  Her parents really hated her. They secretly had been planning a way to ruin her life, and this was most definitely it. They had actually succeeded this time. She checked her watch and then felt her pulse, wondering how much longer it would take until her heart finally ground to a halt.

  She watched in disgust as they passed a series of old, Victorian houses with trim little flower beds in the front and cute sidewalks that led out to the street. When they passed the small strip of stores in the center of town, she felt her jaw hit the ground. Where was the shopping mall? Where was the arcade where she and her buddies went to play games and talk about boys? Not that she had any experience- or interest- in those creatures yet.

  The thought crossed her mind that maybe her parents didn’t want to just outright kill her, but instead wanted to enjoy her slow torturous death from misery in this small, no-life town. She watched in outrage as they passed the school on her sister’s side of the car. DixieAcademy was printed in bold, black letters above the two central doors leading into the school. In Chicago, no one would have dreamed of naming a school something like DixieAcademy. Obviously it was just the backwoods charm coming out in this small southern town, she thought hideously with her twelve year old mind.

  Her father cried, “Here it is girls! Get ready to see beauty,” as they approached the dirt drive that led back to their new house. Lizzie was convinced that anything with a dirt drive connected to it couldn’t possibly be beautiful, but decided saying such would probably get her grounded. She already had enough on her plate to worry about without dealing with something like that.

  They bounced down the long dirt drive, lined with cherry trees, and she held her breath until the house came into view. It was hardly what she would call beautiful- just as she’d suspected.

  The pasture behind the house was severely overgrown, and the fence that had been white at some point during it existence was peeling and faded while several of the boards had fallen or were in the process. The house seemed to be in similar disrepair. The screen door hung off its hinges and Lizzie could spot the gaping hole in it from her spot in the station wagon.

  Paint chipped off the house as well, and two of the green shutters hung crooked from the wall. Her father seemed determined to be optimistic and stated emphatically, “It’s just beautiful, right girls?” All the girls, including their mother, mumbled under their breath.

  The interior of the house didn’t have much to boast about either. It was musty and dusty, and the carpet the previous owners had placed on every square inch of the flooring was so hideous Lizzie was really quite afraid to walk on it. So instead, she wandered outside to investigate potential hiding spots from her awful, awful parents.

  There was a small barn on the edge of the dilapidated pasture, and Lizzie edged the rusty door open to peer inside. She let out a muffled scream when a tomcat yowled at her and skittered past her legs. Her heart raced, and she thought she might have accidentally wet her pants from fright. The rest of the day she was quite content hanging out close to the safety of what she refused to consider her new home.

  “I hope my team is ready to do a little painting,” her father said over breakfast the next morning. The only one who looked happy about it was Skipper the Bichon, but that was most likely because Mary Catherine had been slipping little pieces of her burnt bacon to him under the table since she’d sat down to eat.

  “Skipper said he’d do it just as soon as he got through eating MC’s breakfast.” Lizzie smiled smugly. Her sister simply shot her parents a too innocent smile and said, “What?”

  “Well, regardless of who’s eating whose breakfast, we’ve got lots of work to do around this place and I suggest we do it soon so this place will start lookin’ like home.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we just go back home?” Lizzie looked hopeful but knew it wasn’t promising when her father shot her idea down with a dismissive glint in his eye. She looked to her mom for a supportive voice in getting out of chores, but her mother looked too focused on lifelessly stirring the applesauce in front of her.

  When no other complaints were voiced, her dad spooned a heap of applesauce in his mouth and said, “All right then it’s settled. The girls and I will go to town and buy the paint while Mama unpacks the kitchen. When we get back, we’ll start on the bedrooms.”

  No one looked pleased except for Ed. Even Skipper, the traitor, had dodged out through the hole in the screen and was busying himself with exploring a particularly fascinating ant hill.

  By six o’clock that evening they had gone through six gallons of paint and had more paint fumes to deal with than their small army could handle. They ate a simple dinner out on the front porch, too exhausted to prepare more than a ham sandwich and some sliced tomatoes.

  Lizzie hated to admit it, but the house did look a little better on the inside since they’d painted the bedrooms and a few other spots in the house. There was no denying that it would still need a lot of work, but begrudgingly she decided that the house might just turn out as beautiful as her father had predicted. Now, coming to love the place was another story entirely. One she was willing to bet wouldn’t have a good ending.

  The night was calm around them as they finished the meal in silence. No wind blew, but she could hear a few frogs croaking from some pond in the distance, and the last birds of the day gave off their farewell songs to hold the world until the morning. It wasn’t anything comforting or scary to Lizzie, but she took the sounds in and absorbed them- unsure at the moment if they would mean anything to her in the future or not.

  She glanced at her mother who sat next to her on the wooden floor of the porch. Her mother had been quiet all evening, and Lizzie wondered if she would be any happier here in this new place. “What do you think of it, Mama?”

  Her mother stopped pretending to eat and took a sip of the iced tea by her side. The circles under her eyes hadn’t lessened any, but Lizzie was happy to see that at least they hadn’t turned worse. Lizzie sincerely doubted she could get any skinnier than she was, but she didn’t really understand how it was possible for her to lose so much weight since all she did was sleep all day anyway.

  Faith pulled the shawl a little tighter around her shoulders and looked over at her daughter. She tried to register the question her daughter just asked, but it took a minute to actually focus in on the answer. Lizzie smiled hesitantly at her.

  “What do you think of it, Mama?” Lizzie asked again.

  “Its fine, Lizzie. I think I’m going to like it here just fine.” Faith looked around the place as if noticing her surroundings for the first time. Already she’d felt her brain click into gear more in this one day than she’d felt it work in weeks. It was like cranking an old engine after years of no use. It felt sluggish and weak, but at the same time it was almost a relief to realize her brain still worked after all.

  She noted the holes in the ceiling where someone must have hung a porch swing at some point in the past. She could almost picture it: an old wicker seat with a soft cushion. And ferns. She could imagine ferns sitting in heavy iron urns on either side of the front door. Faith was surprised to feel her face turn up in a small smile, and realized it was the first time in months that that had happened.

  She’d wanted to kick Ed in the shins the day he’d come home from work
and pulled her out from under the covers she’d been wrapped in all day and told her that they were moving. What right had he had, she’d wanted to know, that allowed him to just up and move their family without asking her first? She could still remember the absolute determination framing his handsome face when he’d told her his decision was final and if she didn’t like it he’d just find a way to do it anyway. She hadn’t had the energy to argue with him, so she’d merely pulled the covers back over her head and fallen right back asleep.

  But now... well, she still wasn’t excited about the idea of living in a new place and a new home. But she was starting to see, as much as she didn’t want to admit, that maybe Ed had been right. Maybe it would do her body good to be somewhere new. Somewhere that every corner she turned, she didn’t think about places where new baby items would have gone. At the moment, it wore her out just thinking about it.

  When she realized her daughters were both watching her curiously she gave them a half-hearted smile and crossed her legs in front of her. Her beautiful baby girls. She’d been so preoccupied with her own life lately that she hadn’t even tried to focus on theirs.

  “So girls,” she said, and was startled to hear how rusty her voice had become from disuse. “You start school on Monday. Are you excited?”

  She wanted to laugh, she really did, when they both simultaneously shot her a look that could kill, but she barely had the strength to talk, much more laugh.

  “Yeah, you girls are going to love the new school.” Ed chipped in, munching on the remnants of his wife’s uneaten sandwich. “I talked with the principal on the phone the other day, and he said you girls would be happy with it.”

  MC and Lizzie studied their fingernails with supreme concentration, and scraped bits of white paint off their hands.

  “That school we passed just outside of town- DixieAcademy- that’s the middle and high school. Lizzie you’ll be going there. Did you know it’s where the kids from the closest five towns go to school?”

  “I had no idea.” Her voice was thick with teenage boredom.

  “And MC, you’ll be going to the elementary at the next town over.” She mimicked her sister’s response with exact precision. Ed rolled his eyes, and Faith wondered when her daughters had become such drama queens.

  Chapter Three

  Lizzie stuck out her tongue to the image in the mirror and a distinct pout broke out on her face. She looked like a two year old that her mother had dressed, and even Skipper whimpered and put a paw over his eyes. It was never a good sign when the dog disapproved.

  Today was her first day at DixieAcademy and she was not going to ruin it by showing up in this getup. At the last minute she whipped off the stupid Sunday dress her mother had begged her to wear and threw on a khaki skirt and a white short sleeve button up shirt. It was still warm enough in Edenville to wear sandals so she put those on, too.

  One advantage to living in this stupid old town, she thought as she pulled her long curling hair back into a ponytail, was that it would allow her to wear her warm weather clothes longer than she could have in Chicago. August in Chicago was still warm like it was here, but come September her Fall clothes would be coming out. She wondered how long it would take to cool to Fall weather here in Edenville.

  She threw her backpack over her shoulders, and pecked her mother quickly on the cheek as she set out the front door to walk all of the quarter mile down the street to school. She had to report to Principal Whiteside’s office first thing, and it made her stomach flip to think about it. In Chicago she’d always tried her hardest to be a good student. The last place in the world she liked to be was sitting in a chair waiting to be called in to the principal’s office, because as much as she didn’t like to admit it, deep down in her heart she really did want to please her parents.

  By the time Principal Whiteside had given her a tour of the school and printed out a list of her classes and their room numbers, she was thirty minutes late to the first class of the day. Her heart beat out wild staccato thuds in her chest as she opened the door to her classroom and stepped inside. She had no idea what to expect, and she sent up a silent prayer that she wouldn’t do something stupid to attract more than the usual new kid attention.

  But, as she recalled later, her prayer seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.

  “Okay class,” Mrs. Strickland said as she dropped the chalk into the chalk trey and dusted off her hands. “I want to introduce you to our new student. Lizzie, come here.” Lizzie obeyed and went to stand facing the class directly in front of the teacher. “Class, this is Lizzie Benford. She’s just moved to Edenville with her family from Chicago. Isn’t that great?”

  They all stared at the Chicagoan like she was a Martian.

  “Well, we won’t waste anymore time. Lizzie, you can take that seat back there in the back row next to Billy. Billy, wave your hand so Lizzie will know who I’m talking about. And, welcome to eighth grade, Lizzie.” As she walked away Mrs. Strickland gave her a friendly pat, making Lizzie feel for the moment that life just might be okay.

  The teacher had already turned back to the chalkboard and was scribbling sentences the students were supposed to edit for grammar as she headed down the center row to the back of the class. She was so busy concentrating on trying not to look like a goofball that she completely missed the outstretched leg- she wasn’t sure if it was accidental or not, but she had her suspicions. She heard the class roar with laughter as she fell to the floor, and bit her lip to force herself not to cry right there on the spot.

  Somehow she managed to pick herself up, and scramble to the back of the class. Billy gave her an evil smile when she sat down next to him, and she quickly realized she was staring into the face of one of her newest found enemies.

  She tried her hardest to concentrate on what Mrs. Strickland said in the front of the class, but it was just so difficult when everyone in class seemed so perfectly content staring at her. At first she thought she was imagining things, but then she realized it was true. Every once in a while she’d catch from the corner of her eye someone look in her direction then snicker.

  With a muted whimper, Lizzie slunk lower in her seat. She was having even less of a good start than she’d pictured in the nightmares she’d had all weekend.

  Instead of allowing herself to think about how much she wanted to crawl under her desk and hide, she bit the inside of her lower lip and studied the classroom. Mrs. Strickland, it seemed, had a flare for educational decorating, and had plastered almost every square inch of wall space with famous historical people, the founding fathers of the US, quotes from a multitude of writers, and even pictures of each of the students in the class. She had a sinking feeling she’d have one snapped of her before the day was over.

  The fourth wall of the room was filled with windows that let in the bright light of the day, and a large radiator that obviously was the main heat source for the classroom in the winter. She noticed that the desks were arranged in straight, even rows and that there were little cubbies underneath the desk where students could put their extra books during class.

  Since they were now in the eighth grade, Principal Whiteside explained, they would be switching classes every period like the rest of the Academy. She’d wanted to tell him that she’d been switching classes since fifth grade, but held her tongue so she wouldn’t offend the man her first day in the school.

  She checked her watch to see the time and groaned as she realized it had only been five minutes since she’d taken her seat. They still had fifteen minutes until time to switch classes. Since everyone else seemed so intent on studying her, she decided she might as well study them right back. She started on the row closest to the door and made her way up and down the rows studying each face and figure, wondering which one of them would turn out to be her friends. She even picked out a few that looked like they might be good candidates for friendship.

  She had made it to the last row of students- those closest to the windows- and had just finished studying the
perky blonde that sat in front when she noticed the boy sitting behind the blonde. He sat in his chair, not slumped or perfectly straight, but his eyes were intent on the teacher. His hair was a dark brown, full mass that brushed along the edge of his collared t-shirt, and she wondered for an instant what color his eyes might be. His body was long and lean already, though it hadn’t yet developed the full muscle to go with it. She studied him for longer than she had intended, noting the way he cocked his head sideways like a puppy when the teacher said something particularly interesting to him.

  She wondered again what color his eyes were, and found out that they were a clear, brilliant green- nearly the exact same shade as hers- as he turned to stare straight in her direction. His eyes locked with hers, and for a moment she thought she felt a sizzle spark through the air.

  When she heard the class roar with laughter she snapped back to attention, and realized that the boy had been staring at her along with the rest of the class. Her face reddened perceptibly. Mrs. Strickland stood with her hands on her hips, a frown edging out on her lips.

  “Now Lizzie, I know it’s your first day here at the Academy, but even on your first day you have to pay attention. I asked if there was anything about this sentence you wanted to change.”

  She read the words “I ain’t got nowhere to be right now.” silently to herself then tried to redeem her previous mistakes by saying, “Yes, ma’am. I think it should say, ‘I don’t have anywhere to be right now.”

  “Good. That’s wonderful, Lizzie. They must have you practicing grammar in first grade up in Chicago.” That’s when she realized she’d only compounded the problem of failing miserably to impress her classmates when she heard the muffled giggles and a coughed “Teacher’s pet” coming from the direction of Charlie.

  By lunchtime she was so tired of trying unsuccessfully to make at least one friend that she took her lunch trey to a vacant table and ate by herself. She could hear people talking about her like she couldn’t even hear, so she pretended that she really couldn’t. It was awful here, and she hated this stupid school.