Chapter Text
Ali
You’ve probably heard the saying “throw a spanner in the works”. If not, let us take a moment to explain. The Cambridge dictionary explains the saying quite technically as meaning “ to do something that prevents a plan or activity from succeeding”. To put that in more personal terms, this phrase essentially means you fuck up someone’s plans. Now, if a person throws a spanner in the works, it is usually fixable. Usually. However, when life decides to throw one in there it usually isn’t. Life just sometimes decides that someone is having it to easy, or that they’re too happy. So, life decides to fuck it up.
This happened to Ali Krieger during the summer before her junior year of high school. Everything was going great. She had gotten straight A’s the previous year, even throwing in the odd A+, and she had finally earned a spot on the starting 11 for the Varsity soccer team. Life was good. She was happy.
Then life threw in the unfortunate spanner. This particular spanner took the form of a pretty secretary.
Now, at this point you may be wondering how a secretary could possibly be a problem. Well by herself, she wasn’t a problem. However, being spread across a man’s desk naked when said man’s wife walks into his office, makes her a bit of a problem. This was the case with Ken Krieger’s new secretary. And unfortunately, or fortunately depending on if you’re a glass half full or glass half empty kind of person, Ken’s wife Deb walked in on that exact scene.
So, she, understandably, immediately filed for divorce and kicked the man out. Simple. However, being high school sweethearts who never moved away from their home city, the years of seemingly happy relationship had led to there being far too many memories in their home city of Washington DC. So, she made the decision to move. And of course, Ali and her older brother Kyle decided to move with her. They were so disgusted with their father that they couldn’t even look him in the eye, never mind live with the man.
So here they were, on the Friday before the start of the new school year, pulling into the driveway of their new house in the small town of Crystal Falls, Texas.
Yep, that secretary was quite the spanner.
Deb had decided that she wanted a change of scenery and a small ranch town in southern Texas was, arguably, about as different from Washington DC as one could possibly get.
Their new house was a nice one. Located about half a mile away from the center of the small town itself, in a relatively small gathering of houses not located on an actual ranch. And there were plenty of those. The house was beautiful, in Ali’s opinion. Medium sized, with brownish-grey slats and a dark grey roof, it had a small porch at the front with a porch swing and Ali could see a larger porch on the one side. On the other side there was a double garage connected to the curved driveway on which their car was currently parked. Ali took it all in when she got out of the car, holding her pillow to her chest while taking her earphones out.
“The air is so fresh here,” she heard Kyle say to her mother as he stepped out of the second vehicle, a white Ford pickup truck that the 2 of them shared. “Like, it literally smells fresh.”
He was right. Although fairly dusty, for the streets were mostly dirt in the town, the air did smell significantly fresher than the air in DC.
Just as Ali was opening the back seat of her mother’s car to retrieve her suitcase, she heard an odd rumble that she couldn’t identify. Looking up, she made eye contact with Kyle, who looked just as confused as she felt. They looked towards the end of the street, expecting to see a vehicle of some form, and they were both incredibly surprised by what they saw. There, at the end of the street closest to where a collection of ranches began, was a group of four people riding down the street on galloping horses, cheering as they charged down the street, kicking up a dust cloud in their wake.
“You’ve got to be joking,” Kyle laughed.
Ali couldn’t help but agree with his surprised statement as she laughed along.
As the riders ran towards their house, Ali got a closer look, and she smiled and continued laughing when she saw they looked like a group of cowboys straight out of some western. Having stayed in a city her entire life, she didn't realize that people still rode horses outside of sporting events. But these people made it look like the most natural thing in the world. They all wore jeans and boots, 3 of them wearing flannel shirts of varying style, and the last one wearing a plain black short sleeved button up. Hell, two of them were even wearing cowboy hats, a third wearing a backwards baseball cap.
They rode past, and Ali could hear them laughing and she couldn’t help but leach off of their obvious joy. She just felt so much lighter hearing it. Hardly anybody laughed and cheered so openly back home, especially for no apparent reason. As they rode by, Ali made eye contact with one of the flannel and cowboy hat clad riders. This one’s flannel shirt was purple and black, and without sleeves, allowing Ali to catch a glimpse of a tattoo on their upper arm as the fleeting eye contact was broken and the riders continued their journey.
The eye contact may have only lasted a moment, but Ali thought of nothing much else besides the smiling face of the unknown rider for the rest of the day while she unpacked her new room. Maybe moving here wasn’t so bad after all.