Pop! Flash! by Jamie Collins

Author:Jamie Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jamie Collins

30

The Ryder truck pulled up to the weathered two story Georgian house with the rusted- out swing set in the backyard. The perfectly pruned azalea bushes tucked neatly beneath the large picture window overlooked the cobblestone street on the corner of the block where the Masters children grew up and ran and played. It was where they rode their bicycles up and down the neighborhood streets, never too far out of earshot from their mother’s dinner call.

Ellie was ten, sitting between her brothers in the back seat of a very-packed family van. The awkward teen boys were jabbing elbows and kicking up trouble astride her, when they suddenly paused momentarily from their Gameboys to watch it all fade behind them in the rearview mirror. It was moving day.

What would Texas be like? Ellie wondered. All she could imagine were tumbleweeds and prickly cactus plants and ranch-hand cowboys running around. Her father had said that Houston would be nothing like that.

Her imagined scenario of life in Texas filled her with dread. “What if I don’t make any new friends?” Ellie had asked, fearing that her distinctive East Coast accent would set her apart from her classmates right from the start. Why did her father have to take another job so many miles from everything they knew?

He was a surgeon, probably the best in the world, her brother Matt had said. People needed him there to help them get better. Ellie could not argue with that. Luckily for the Masters children and others like them, many of the area schools were filled with transplants from northern and eastern cities whose families had similarly been relocated to Houston due to their fathers’ jobs with the hospitals and large oil corporations.

Happily, it was not as difficult to get acclimated, as Ellie had feared. Seventeen out of thirty-one of her classmates were also transplants. Ellie’s new friend, McKenzie was from Queens, making her mild East Coast accent seem nonexistent by comparison.

The Masters moved into a large lavish home located in an affluent suburban region called the Woodlands, just on the outskirts of downtown Houston. The sprawling corporate and residential mini-mecca featured newly constructed luxury homes and businesses dotting the fairways of competition-worthy championship golf courses and glistening man-made lakes.

It was a lush and luxurious setting, with the constant waft of sweet cedar and pine baking in the heat and humidity held prevalent in the thick, stifling air drifting in from the Gulf. In a word, it was H-O-T. The Masters felt more like they had moved to Honduras than Houston. It was definitely going to take some getting used to.

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