Chapter 26

Moving day. It felt like only hours had passed since the dance, but it had actually been several days. Apparently, my parents had been considering the move to Chicago for quite some time, but had been unsure of how to mention it. I was sure my parents had planned it with Bobbi's mother so that we'd all end up in Chicago, but who knew?

I knew I should probably feel overwhelmed. There was so much to do in so little time, although a lot of it had already been done in the seven or so days since the dance (and eight or so days since my parents' announcement). But all I felt was calm.

"Claudia? I hope you aren't eating junk food!"

(Since the night of the announcement about Chicago, when I'd skipped supper and my mother had come to check on me, she'd been worried about my eating habits. I'd been so wrapped up in my thoughts that I hadn't even hidden the box of cookies I'd been snacking on. She saw them, and although she hadn't mentioned anything right away, she was mentioning it almost every chance she had now.)

"I'm not!" I lied. There was no way she could see me. I was sitting in my bedroom, eating a Twinkie (I had filled one whole box with junk food hidden around my room, and kept it open) and looking around at my boxes. Filling them had been easy enough, and I'd decorated them since with my markers. They looked a little like Kid-Kits now, but that was okay. There were seven (two of books, one of CDs, one of snacks, and three of jewelry and art supplies) all together, and I doubted anyone could lose them. Unless, of course, they were color-blind.

I didn't care if she knew I was eating junk food. She knows I do. I'd had a good breakfast. But I'd care if she caught me lying, so I hid the Twinkie wrapper in my coat pocket when I was finished.

It would be so weird to leave this room. My window had always faced the street, and more importantly, the houses of my friends. We had solved many mysteries on Stoneybrook. We had cleaned up a lot of vomit in Stoneybrook, too. Some memories would be good to leave behind.

But not all of them. While my aunt's miscarriage was a bad thing, some good had come from it. And Lynn was adorable, but we'd only get to see her once in a while now that we were moving.

A heavy knock on my door made me jump, and I barely had time to straighten up from my spot over a box of art supplies before the door opened. Apprehensive, I watched as the person barged in. Kristy stepped in and froze, looking around. It was clearly a shock to her, seeing the former BSC headquarters so empty. She stared at me, wide-eyed.

"I didn't think you were actually leaving," she murmured.

"It's moving day," I pointed out, but that didn't seem to make her feel any better. I felt the strangest emptiness as I spoke; as though I was reading from a script and wouldn't be affected by anything I said. Maybe the reality of the whole situation just hadn't hit yet. It was possible. My friends had all moved a time or two, but I never did. Their stories were interesting, but they were never all that real to me. Now, maybe I would understand what they meant.

"I guess I just thought you were kidding," Kristy replied, her voice unusually soft, and when she glanced at me, her eyes looked kind of moist, like she was fighting tears. She looked away quickly, but even as she looked around again, I couldn't help but feel as though I should say something to her. Anything. We'd once been friends, after all. And even though I was trying, I just couldn't find anything to say that wouldn't sound like it was a farewell cliché like you might hear in a movie. It's hard to say good-bye to someone you thought was out of your life. It's especially hard when the other person was a friend and doesn't seem to realize that you are over them, and even more so when that person is obviously not over you yet.

I shook my head and resisted the urge to point out that I hadn't been very tolerant of humor in the past few months. I didn't have to, anyway. Kristy, judging by her expression of sadness, seemed to understand.

"It's just going to be so hard," she sighed finally. "You were all I had left."

"You didn't seem to care much about me or anyone else for the last few months," I couldn't resist pointing out. "I didn't think it would even matter to you."

Kristy looked like she'd been slapped. But she didn't point out the obvious. Instead, she just stood there for a moment, without speaking, until at last she sighed in what sounded like defeat before looking at me again. "I was afraid of losing another person I cared about."

Another silence. I knew we had at least fifteen minutes before the moving van and the men were here to load our furniture and boxes, but it would be fifteen long minutes. I used to think an hour to make my good-byes wouldn't be enough. Now, it was as if fifteen minutes would be forever.

Who was she, anyway? This wasn't the Kristy Thomas, loudmouth and leader, I'd grown up with. And I'd seen her through some of the toughest times anyone could endure.

I found myself growing angry as I looked her over. She may have gone through two divorces (one when she was too young to remember) and had a brother go off to college, but she didn't know real pain. She had never starved or been incapable of movement. And having a friend you ignored for nearly a year move away shouldn't have been a big deal. So why should I feel sorry for her? It was her own fault if she'd decided to become a vampire and hide out in her house until everyone gave up on her.

"I know you must be mad at me," Kristy said quickly, having noticed my expression. "I would be, too. But I just…couldn't let you go without seeing you."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything.

"And I know it isn't likely you'll ever forgive me for my ignoring you—"

"That isn't really what's bothering me," I interrupted her. "I still don't know if I can trust you. Because of you, several dogs were poisoned."

"I didn't do that!" Kristy cried, holding up her hands as if to show me she was unarmed. "I swear! I just wish I knew how to prove it to you!"

"The detectives found your prints on the bag!" I exploded, and Kristy stared at me.

"Of course they did! Those were Shannon's treats!"

I just stared back. I had put the treats she'd given me into a brown paper bag, but I'd kept the plastic bag she'd handed the treats to me in. (I hadn't wanted the rustling of the plastic to alert a guard to our presence.) The evidence (Kristy's fingerprints) had been on each treat, as well as the plastic, so it was obvious that she'd been involved somehow.

"And you really don't know what kind of poison it was, or how it got there?" I asked, sidestepping her retort and trying to focus on my questions. Her gaze was steady and unnerving.

Kristy shook her head slowly. She was still staring at me, like her gaze could convince me of her innocence. But I'd looked repeatedly into Bobbi's eyes back when I'd still been listening to Emily's accusations, and I hadn't been able to see her innocence. I wasn't about to trust anyone else's eyes for the answers.

Nobody ever said the answers from the windows to the soul would be easy, I thought.

"You still don't believe me, do you?" Kristy asked, although her tone indicated that she was either already sure of this, or that she was deep in thought.

"I can't," I replied honestly, and she snapped out of her trance.

"You shouldn't argue with the friends you've got, or you won't have any," Kristy snapped.

Softly, because she had turned around and was probably suppressing tears again, I replied, "I do have friends. And our bond is strong because we can argue."

Kristy turned back to me. Her eyes were far beyond the unwavering gaze of annoyance for a delayed arrival she used to level BSC members with if they were late. They burned with emotion too intense to name, and I was struck by how I'd thought of the BSC and its members as being too shallow for such intensity and was, as I seemed to be a lot lately, proven wrong yet again.

But she didn't speak, and she didn't have to. Her eyes said plenty. She turned and left—she didn't stomp her feet or stalk down the stairs or even slam the door. And for some reason, her silent departure was more daunting than it would have been if she'd yelled at me.

* * *

The moving truck was loaded. My boxes, my furniture, and my life in general were inside. Behind us, as my parents, sister, and I watched the movers close the doors and ready to turn to keys over to my father by going through the paperwork amongst themselves once more, our house sat empty. Someone else had come to look at it, and although I knew the house had to sell for my parents to finalize a payment plan on a house in Chicago, I couldn't imagine our stuff in another house, or someone else's stuff in ours.

"Do you have enough stuff for the road?" Mom asked nervously.

I was nervous, too. The trip would be just over seven hundred miles long (if my calculations were correct) and although we could probably do it in a day by car, it was the nearing the end of February and the roads were expected to be icy. On top of that, we'd have to move ourselves to Chicago. My father would drive the U-Haul, and Janine would be his guide—navigating the maps and keeping an eye out for wildlife. I would be Mom's navigator, despite my poor grades in geography. (I think she trusted me mostly because Dad and Janine would be behind us, and both parents would have their cell phones with them, so Janine could call if we took a wrong turn.) Although we planned on doing the trip in two days, especially since it was now early afternoon (the truck had been supposed to come the previous night but hadn't, so we couldn't leave at six A.M. as planned), I was nervous, too. I don't like car travelling much.

"Snacks, music," I said, patting my knapsack. "A couple of books in case the hotel room doesn't have cable or there's nothing good on."

Mom nodded, but (thankfully) didn't grill me about whether or not I'd remembered to pack any 'feminine products' into the bag I'd be carrying with me. She was instructing my father not to drive too fast, which is a problem he has when he has a long drive. I was glad they'd be in separate cars, so they couldn't argue during the stressful trip.

Bobbi and her family had packed up the night before, and had left early in the morning. Unless we sped or they broke down, it was unlikely we'd meet before we got to Chicago.

"It's kind of scary, isn't it?" Janine asked, making conversation as Mom and Dad fought over the keys to the van, right there in front of the movers.

"The fight?" I asked, knowing perfectly that she was talking about the move.

"Did you make up with Kristy?" was her reply, avoiding explaining herself.

"Not really," I said, with a sigh. "She left and…well, I don't think I'll ever hear from her again. It's hard to say good-bye, especially when only one of us feels she already has."

I didn't bother pointing out that I'd felt like I'd said good-bye to Kristy and Stoneybrook itself a long time ago (everything that had once mattered most to me was gone now), knowing it would ruin the mood. Besides, somehow, Janine understood.

"It's too bad," she said, referring to changes in friendship and changes in general.

Minutes later, when she was climbing into the moving truck and I was swinging my knapsack to the floor at my feet in the front seat of the car, which held some of our delicate things we hadn't wanted transported on the truck, and thinking over Janine's words.

She usually didn't make a lot of sense. I used to think it was because she always seemed so disinterested in the things I liked, which were the only things that seemed to make sense to me. But now she was trying, and actually succeeding.

I slipped a CD into the player and Mom didn't say a word about it when she got in. It wasn't loud. I started in on the bag of chips I'd removed from my knapsack (I'd brought mostly chips because they help to settle car sickness, according to an Internet site I found for long-distance travelers) and again, Mom didn't say a word about it.

"Are you okay?" I finally asked.

"Just nervous, honey," she replied, but she didn't look at me as she spoke, so I wondered if she was lying just for the same of my nerves.

"Me too," I finally replied, but she didn't smile or reassure me. So I turned the volume on the stereo up a little higher, and settled into my seat and ate my chips without another word. If she wanted to go through this trip with an uncomfortable silence, I wasn't going to play along. I certainly wasn't going to contribute to the silence by acting uncomfortable when she didn't bother to speak.

I had taken pictures of every room in our house before we'd started packing (I wanted to keep the image of the home I'd grown up most in with me forever) and hoped Mom wasn't upset about the move. It had sounded like it was her idea, after all.

Maybe she regrets the decision, now that it seems so much more real, I thought.

After about an hour, Mom finally told me to turn the volume down. (It had actually been sixty-eight minutes.) I did, just because she'd finally spoken to me.

We were leaving Stoneybrook, but I felt as though I wasn't really leaving my home behind. Maybe it was because Stoneybrook had stopped feeling like home when my friends left. Or maybe it was because I'd somehow just stopped feeling things.

Or, and I liked this thought more, I had grown up and could deal with things like this now. I may have been leaving a house, but my family and my real friends would be with me in Chicago. Ashley and Bobbi would be there. A year and six months ago, if someone had asked me who would be with me a year and a half from then, I would have answered without hesitation and rattled off the names of the BSC members. Little did I know just how different things would be. Stacey was dead. Kristy was uncaring—or had seemed so until very recently. Everyone else had moved away. And I seemed to be the only one really moving on. Jessi's move was brought on mostly by Mallory's transferring to boarding school, and Kristy couldn't deal with much of anything in a way other than to hide in her room all day. And I was now leaving Stoneybrook for good—moving away and moving on.

Stacey probably would have been proud of me. Despite our many ups and downs, we'd been close for the better part of a year—our first year as teenagers. She had always seemed so sophisticated. Now, although I may not have looked sophisticated, I felt mature. And considering that, awhile ago, I would have said you had to feel mature to look mature, or look mature to feel mature or something like that, it was probably an improvement.

I still felt calm, although the stirrings of previously dormant feelings were bubbling in my stomach as familiar landmarks gave way to new sights, sounds, and smells. Soon, even the most familiar of surroundings—places I had travelled through on other trips I would return home to Stoneybrook from—were behind us. Maybe this felt so different because we wouldn't be returning. Maybe because our house, formerly busy every day for close to sixteen years, was now empty, just a shell of our former lives. Would our memories forever swim the halls of the house? Would the next people to live there still hear our voices—me calling Stacey just to chat, Janine and I arguing, Mimi's soft voice? Would they know just how special that house was? Would they stay as long as we had? Would they ever wonder how the dent in the laundry room got there, or would they even notice? I saw it every time I did my laundry, and remembered the way it had happened. I'd been seven years old and carting a basket of towels upstairs because I wanted to help my mother. I'd slipped on a fallen sock and my head hit the wall. The plastic headband covered in spiky squares had made the dent, and given me a headache. I hadn't ever worn the headband again (it was ruined) but I still had it, tucked away in my sock drawer. Now, of course, it was in the box marked 'Art Supplies' and decorated with shiny star stickers.

And, just like that headband, life may dent you but it will never destroy you. And don't forget it, Claudia Lynn Kishi, my mind said, and as we drove away from all that was familiar and into the unknown, I felt myself relax at the thought. The unknown was scary, but I could handle it.

Author's Note: Here it is…the final chapter for Accusations! I may do a sequel yet or add another chapter if this one didn't seem conclusive enough, but for tonight, I'll say that the story (this part, anyway) is done. Feedback, please?

Thank you immensely to everyone who read, reviewed, and even just looked. This has been an incredible experience, writing a fic this long with so much outside input. I hope it ended satisfactorily for everyone! :D