InsaneJournal

There is no home like the one you've got, because that one belongs to you. [narrative]
Cal had already decided that he didn't like Santa Monica. Stepping out of the airport terminal, he blinked at the sun and felt the heat piercing through the jacket that he'd worn on the plane. Almost seventy degrees outside.

In February.

It wasn't that Cal had never traveled before. Granted, most of it was done when he was younger and his father still felt bad about leaving him home alone, but the point remained. He'd been to hotter climates in the winter, and colder ones in the summer. But never to go live. And that alone made him dig in his heels about it. It wasn't even that he was so eager to stay at home. It had, after all, turned into something of a hellhole for him. Suspended from school, people vandalizing the house, one group trying to jump him when he'd gone out for the night -- a new start was really the best, just to get away from it all. But all of that anger didn't really have any place to go at the moment, and so he was expelling at least some of it on having to be uprooted to the other side of the country.



His father's apparent lack of concern didn't really make anything better. Dr. Rankin and his son had never had the closest of connections; after his wife's death during the birth, he'd found it both too hard and too baffling to figure out how to be a good parent on his own. Cal was fed and clothed and didn't generally have any real wants or needs that weren't seen to. On an emotional level though, no. The elder Rankin figured everything would be made better by moving, and was used to tempers from Cal, so he was largely ignoring the fact that his son seemed to hate all of this.

Getting into the waiting car, Cal just watched the scenery go by, not paying attention to whomever his father was talking to on the phone. At the house, he got out and went inside, hearing his father saying something to his back about going out to dinner or ordering in. "Whatever, Ronald!" He didn't call him that all of the time, but he liked to occasionally. His dad never corrected him, but Cal could tell that it bothered him. He went into his new bedroom and shut the door (rather loudly and on purpose), looking at all of the boxes and then going to flop onto the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Stupid Santa Monica.