A Fresh Start in a New City was...

A fresh start in a new city was the last thing Abby wanted. It felt as though she'd only just found her place in this one, and to move now would make her a stranger in a strange place all over again. With a sad sigh she tore up her bus timetable - she'd have to get a new one, and who knew how long it would take her to familiarise herself with it? Too long to be practical in the middle of the term - how many times would she be late for school because she missed a bus, or waited at the wrong stop?
But when Abby told this to her parents they only sighed.
"The inconvenience of moving does not outweigh that of staying," her mother said sternly. "And there are plenty of positives that you're not even considering."
"Lincoln isn't even a real city," Abby argued. "Their population is less than that of a New York block! It's a million miles away from anywhere, only accessible by helicopter, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have penicillin yet, let alone electricity."
Her father hid a smile at her exaggeration - her mother was glaring.
"Lincoln is beautiful, and spacious enough that we will have a decent yard. It's remote enough that nobody has heard of our family yet, and for most of the year it's either raining or snowing. That place is gonna be impossible to burn."
Abby rolled her eyes.
"Mother. Please. It's not as if I'm some kind of serial arsonist."
"I suppose all of the fires were coincidences, like you keep insisting."
Her mother rolled her eyes.
"Or a set-up," her father added helpfully, pretending to be engrossed in his newspaper.
"You never believe my side!" They'd had this argument before - practically line for line - yet it still managed to make Abby's blood boil. "You call me a pyromaniac and a pathological liar as if I was some nutcase and not your daughter!"
"You wer emy daughter when you played with dolls and messed up the kitchen and pretended to do your homework. You were my daughter when a fireman dragged you out of a blazing inferno... the first time. By the third fire I was suspicious and by the eighth I was wondering if my daughter had been spirited away in the night and replaced with some demon."
Abby gaped - her mother had never said anything like this before. Even her father looked shocked, and had given up pretending not to be involved.
"Oh, you look like my daughter and you move like her and sound and smell and reason like my daughter, but you must be something else."
"Evelyn," Abby's father said, "I think that's enough."
Abby watched numbly as they left the room. Something else?
Of course she wasn't something else.
Holding back tears she ran upstairs, prying the panel of her wardrobe aside and pulling out the box of things she'd been planning on leaving behind - her library card, a hand-drawn map of the best takeaway stores in the neighbourhood. Two years worth of movie ticket stubs. A cigarette lighter with scratches on its casing.
That was the life she was abandoning, though it was too painful to destroy all of its relics, and too painful to take them with her.