FicWad

“A picture’s worth a thousand words, and a photo album is worth even more.”

That’s what my mother would always say to me. She was the sentimental type, the sort of mother that likes putting aside at least one day a year to look through all her old photo albums. That was just her thing. Along with scrap booking and experimenting with miscellaneous fruity alcoholic beverages, of course.

I usually found some sort of way to get out of her little sentimental moments. Being smack dab in the middle of five children, it was usually easy; She’d always find someone else to corner. Usually my only sister, Beth, the oldest of us, who already had a two year old of her own to take care of, was the one stuck with it. She lived with her husband, Nick and daughter, Casey, of course, so that was mom’s excuse. “You never see me anymore!” she would say.

Spencer lived out of town, too. He was my older brother, two years younger than Beth, and two years older than me. He was currently living in Los Angeles, trying to make a living as a dancer. His live-in boyfriend, Anthony, was extremely proud of him.

Every time Spence came home to Jersey, mom went on another photo album spree. “Look how cute you were, Spencey!” she’d exclaim, her voice taking on the high pitch that it always did when she was excited. Spencer got it the worst out of all of us. I felt kind of bad for him.

If it wasn’t one of those two, it was almost always Jon-O that got the photo album duty. Jonathon, who we affectionately called Jon-O, was the youngest of us at the tender age of eleven. Our mom would always make him look through the photos of things he’d missed. It wasn’t his fault he was an accident, but I wasn’t about to complain.

Alex and I never had to do photo duty. Alexander James and Audrey Jeanette, AJ squared, the dynamic duo, twins. Alex and I always got out of it one way or another. Even we couldn’t figure out how.

But every streak of good fortune comes to an end some how.

It was late August, almost September, a day or so before I was scheduled to start senior year. Of course, my mother found it appropriate to move us from one town to another. It wasn’t entirely her fault, I suppose. Dad got a new job, moving us from Newark, New Jersey to Belleville.

It could be worse, I guess. I mean, for one, I’d never liked Newark all that much. New Jersey wasn’t exactly the best place to live safety wise. We’d never been able to play outside all that much, because my mom didn’t exactly feel like dealing with a child being shot on the streets. She’d always called New Jersey “the armpit of America”, and Newark was the worst.

It wasn’t like we were moving across the country, or even to a different state. Just a different city. But a different city meant a different school, and a different school meant having to make new friends. No teenager wanted to do that, especially when they were going into their senior year of high school. Who wanted to be doubled with the pressure of fitting in just when that pressure was supposed to be relieved? But there wasn’t exactly anything I could do about that.

Out house in Belleville was beautiful, I could say that much. It was in a new development of HUGE houses, and ours was right on the corner. It was two stories, big and white, with light blue shutters and the wrap-around porch my mother had always wanted in her house. Alex finally got out of sharing a room with Jon-O, and Dad finally got the office that he’d always needed to do his work in.

But it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like home. Our tiny, three bedroom house in Newark was home, no matter how shitty the living situation was. Sure, it got better when Beth went to college, and then again when Spencer did the same. Still, having this much room to live in was foreign, weird. I wanted to be cramped, I wanted to look outside and see a dirty street instead of the perfect homes that were now facing my window.

But mom was happy, and she made that no secret.

“Audrey, honey, I’m unpacking the photo albums!” she exclaimed excitedly as the two of us sat on the rug of our new, spacious family room, surrounded in cardboard boxes. I made sure she couldn’t see my exaggerated eye-roll. “What do you say we look through them, just the two of us?”

“That sounds swell, mother.” I said sarcastically. My mom’s expression soured with her frown.

“Well, if you don’t want to, we don’t have to.” she said, and her voice had the twinge of sadness that always made me feel guilty. I shifted towards her and slid my knees against the carpet so I could get a better look at the pictures I couldn’t escape. Her expression immediately perked up, and she flipped open the cover of the book so quickly I felt like she was trying to swat me away with it.

The particular album she had in her hands was from the younger years of Alex and I. Mom had a labeled photo album for every era of life, everything important. One dedicated solely to school pictures, one for snapshot from Spencer’s many dance recitals, One for Jon-O’s every sports picture, et cetera, et cetera. I was surprised that the one she had in hand actually had some pictures of me in it.

The first page was a professional family photo from when Alex and I were three, Spencer was five, and Beth was seven. The parents weren’t in it, of course; Mom didn’t believe in having professional pictures done with her kids. It was our turn, she’d had hers. The picture was huge, and it took up the whole page.

In looking at that picture, I realized just how much Alex and I didn’t look like twins. None of us looked related, except for maybe Alex and Beth. Beth’s hair was shorter here, with the same dark ebony color that she’d refused to change through the years. Her hair was long now, always thrown up in the traditional “mommy” bun or pony tail.

Alex looked just like her; They could easily pass as siblings, while it was harder for the rest of us. Alex’s hair was cut short in this picture, while now, at age eighteen, it flopped over his eyes in a way my mother hated. His hair had the same ebony shade as Beth, and his eyes shown bright green in this picture, showing the only way that the two of us looked even remotely alike.

I hadn’t changed much. My hair had always been one step short of flaming red, a sort of dark strawberry blonde, and curlier than anything I’d ever seen. Alex and I shared the same bright green eyes, as my father did, too. I was deathly pale, as I still was, with light freckles sprinkling across my nose.

Spencer looked totally different. His hair was auburn in this picture, lighter than Beth and Alex’s, but darker than mine. His eyes were honey brown back then. Almost everything about him had changed since. He’d bleached his hair and started using gel, so his hair was always spiked in a way that made him look like American Idol’s Blake Lewis. After getting totally sick of the glasses he’d been cursed with, he got contacts. They were colored ones, ones that made his eyes light blue in color. Anthony totally loved his new eyes. “They make me melt every time!” he’d told me once, and I laughed.

“Look at how cute you all are!” My mother exclaimed, admiring the photographer’s skilled picture. She brushed her fingers against in lightly, wiping away some of the dust that had gathered on it after years of sitting on a shelf.

“Mhm.” I mumbled quietly. I didn’t really like looking at pictures like these, ones that reminded me how much we’d changed. It made me think of other changes, ones that I wasn’t particularly happy about. One certain one came to mind.

And that was the one I was faced with when my mother turned the page.

There were four kids in the first picture. Two of them I recognized instantly as myself and Alex. The other two I instantly recognized as well, but it made me wish that I hadn’t. It wasn’t like there was anything horrible that they did to me that made me never want to see them again. I just.... missed them. A lot. And I hadn’t seen then since I was seven.

I was the only girl in the picture, in the middle of the two people I wish I didn’t recognize. The one to my right was taller than I was, even as children. He was pale despite the sun that shone in the background, and his hair was black, long and probably not washed as much as it should have been.

In between Alex and I was another boy, about my height as opposed to the other. He had brown hair and large glasses concealing the upper half of his face. His wide grin concealed the lower half, and it took me a while before I could even spot his nose.

Their names bubbled to my lips, but my mom said them first. “You remember these guys, don’t you?” she asked me. Before I could get in a word or even nod my head, she was talking again. “Gerard and Mikey Way. They lived down the street, remember? You and Alex used to love playing with them. It used to take me so long to get you to come home!”

“I remember, mom.” I said. Of course I remembered them. How could I not? They were the best friends I’d ever had, better than anyone I’d ever become friends with since. I was heartbroken when they left.

Gerard and Mikey had lived two houses down from us in Newark since we were toddlers. Gerard was two years older than Alex and I, and Mikey was a year younger. Our mother had set up play dates on an almost daily basis. Alex tended to gravitate more towards Mikey, while I was closer with Gerard. All in all, though, the four of us were inseperable.

When Alex and I were seven, Mikey was six, and Gerard was nine, their mother had announced to us all at a family cookout that they were moving. I didn’t fully grasp the concept until the day I saw the boxes and moving van. I’d never really gotten a chance to say goodbye, and I’d never forgotten that. I cried myself to sleep for as long as I could remember.

“Mom.” I said quickly. “I feel kind of sick all of the sudden. I think I must have eaten something weird at that restaurant we went to for dinner.” I said. It was the best excuse I could think of, and her expression told me she bought it. “I think I’m just going to go to bed.”

“Alright, honey.” she said, rubbing my back in a motherly fashion as I stood up and straightened myself. “You get your rest. You’ve got a big day tomorrow, and you wouldn’t want to be sick for your first day as a high school senior!”

Please. Don’t remind me.


A/N -- So, this is my first story on the site. I really hope you guys like it, and I promise it gets better. We had to get the introductions out of the way, didn't we?
Reviews are greatly appriciated; I always like to hear how you think I'm doing!