ALONE Chapter 1

You’re going, and that’s final.”
“Damn it, dad, you--”
“--and one more word out of you and it’ll be three weeks instead of two”.
Jo’s birthday: exactly two weeks and three days away. I bet he fuckin knows it, too, she thinks. The thought of spending her sixteenth birthday in the middle of fucking nowhere--on a goddamned island, no phone, no computer, no friends…intolerable. She whirled around and trounced up the stairs, indulging in a good solid door slam when she got to her room.
Jo flung herself on to her bed, furious. I know, she thought. I’ll run away. That’d teach them. I’ll get out of bed at five--no, four--tomorrow morning and I’ll just take off. Maybe crash at Amy’s place for a week. Maybe they’ll go anyway and maybe they won’t and I don’t really give a flying fuck.
The phone rang. Jo rolled off her bed and went to retrieve it, but Dad had already gotten it downstairs. Jo sighed a fifteen year old world-on-my-shoulders sigh that would have impressed anyone there to see her. There had to be parents more lame than Dan and Karen MacIlwayne, but right now she couldn’t think of any. Her best friend Amy’s ’rents were off in fucking Paris for a week--second honeymoon, they said. Amy confided to Jo that it was more like a stave-off-divorce trip. Amy’s dad was a lawyer, and he’d been caught with one of his secretaries, minus the, uh, legal briefs. Jo thought maybe he’d need his own lawyer before long. Anyway, they’d left Amy all on her own…there was going to be one ripper of a party at her place Saturday night. Practically everybody Jo knew was either invited or had invited themselves. That included Greg D'Alessio. And where would Jo MacIlwayne, the very life of the party, be on Saturday? Not making out in a corner with Greg, not getting smashed with Amy, not enjoying life in the slightest. No, she'd be on an island, about a hundred miles from the ass-crack of nowhere.
Not if I can help it, she thought.
It was just so not fair! Her parents had talked about this trip for months…two weeks up north in the wilderness, away from what they called stress and what Jo usually called “the action”. Well, there wasn’t much action around this place, Jo thought, but there was a whole lot of stress, most of it hers. Mom had inflicted a curfew on Jo--10:00, even on Saturdays. Just because Jo made the mistake of coming home at three in the morning one night, a little…okay, a lot…drunk. But that was three weeks ago, and school had ended since, and Christy said that Dar and her bitchy friends were calling Jo “Amish” now. It was enough to really piss you off.
A knock on Jo’s door that startled her out of her black reverie.
“Get yourself packed, Jo. That was your mother. She got to leave work early today after all, so we’re going to scoot as soon as she gets home. Beat the traffic.”
Aw, shit, now what the fuck do I do?