Cursed

❀Chapter One❀

Aurora

I don't remember much about my childhood. Every once and a while my parents would pull out old photo albums. Usually to embarrass me in front of my friends with a candid pantless baby picture. On occasion I would peer through the images on my own, just to see if some deep memory stirred up. Nothing ever did.

When I was growing up I would play in the street with no worry of being kidnapped or hit by a car during rush hour. Living in a small country town definitely has its perks in that way. In fact, rush hour isn't even a thing where I'm from. Everyone knows my parents and my parents know almost everyone. Even if they don't, they know someone, who knows someone, who knows that person.

The summers are brutally hot and the winter's bite at your skin, but my friends and I played outside almost every day after school regardless of the weather. The cornfields behind our house are either a maze of green stalks or a frozen tundra to slip and slide on. There's one really big hill in the center of town that everyone goes to sled on once the first snow falls thick enough. Kids will sled down it so many times that a coating of ice has at times lasted long through Springtime.

I'm an only child, so my parents tend to focus a lot of attention on me. Which is both a blessing and a curse at times. There's always been a delicacy with how my parents handle me that started at a young age but continued into my teen years. They would intervene before I ever failed at anything. Always staying nearby if they deemed a situation too dangerous. They're overprotective to say the least.

As I got older I started to feel a great deal of pressure to succeed in school. I spent many hours practicing piano, horseback riding, reading the classics, and studying extra subjects, dictated by my parents. Everything my mother and father did for me was to move me towards the inevitable of applying to an Ivy League school. That was the end goal, or the only goal as far as I could see. My parents love me more than anything but their dreams for me left very little room for my own imagination.

There was this one time in the eighth grade when my friend Samantha and I caught a rebellious streak. Choosing not to follow the rules, we walked to a skatepark in the not-so-great part of town.

"Rory I'm so nervous, what if someone recognizes us?"

Samantha whined as we huddled on a park bench and watched the skaters take cigarette breaks in between their tricks on the ramp. We got out our grape-flavored, extra-long, pixie sticks that Samantha bought with her babysitting income. We would accidentally inhale the intoxicatingly sweet powder and then burst into fits of coughing and giggling. Our excitement was short-lived as a friend of Samantha's mom busted us while driving by the park on her way to work.

"Do you know where your daughter is right now?"

We heard the shrill sound of her voice as she pulled into the parking lot, waving at us hysterically. The kids that were skating looked over as we got dragged away. The sound of their laughter was beyond humiliating. Samantha and I decided right then and there that it was easier to follow the rules than get caught. We've both played it super straight since then.

After eighth grade was over, Samantha and I changed buildings and entered into our freshman year of High School. Our friendship was strained by everything from AP classes, maintaining the highest GPA possible, and social circles. It turns out Samantha may have been jealous as our ambitions to succeed pitted us against each other. Or maybe it was because boys had started to look at me and not at her. Regardless of that Samantha ended up clicking right in with the popular girls and I couldn't have been further on the outside of that circle. I tried sneaking a wave to her once while she was sitting with them during lunch. Needless to say, it wasn't reciprocated. The way she and her new friends all looked right through me like I didn't exist was enough for me to stop trying to rekindle our childhood friendship.

Junior year was somewhat of a success for me, I had officially mastered the messy bun. My blonde hair was always piled high on my head but the shorter bang pieces fell and framed my face. My acne prone skin had finally cleared up, making my light blue eyes stand out against the paleness of my cheeks. My lips were always red from nibbling on them when I was feeling stressed, or thinking about a particularly tricky math problem. It didn't matter to me if I was attractive to boys or not, because the thought of making time for a boyfriend was never possible with my busy schedule of extracurriculars.

One unfortunate side effect of all the over achieving was that I started having anxiety attacks. I don't know if it was their guilt that made my parents agree to letting me smoke medicinal marijuana or my twenty page power-point on the benefits of THC. Either way, when I researched anti-anxiety medication I found that most of the drugs had names that sounded more like alien planets (such as; Xanax, Valium, Ativan), then medicine. At the risk of taking one and turning into the creature from the black lagoon, I decided to do my own research into more natural remedies.

The testimonials I found from a large community of people who stand behind marijuana for anti-anxiety purposes was enough to convince me. And apparently my parent's too. They knew that I wasn't going to turn into a stereotypical stoner, simply because I had too much on my plate for me to let that happen. But it was something that I didn't advertise I was doing, I always smoked at home or secretly in my car. Not because I didn't want the other kids at school to know I smoked weed. Mostly I was ashamed about the reason I did it in the first place. There were times when my heart felt like it was beating so hard it could rupture. Or when I was about to present my work at the Science Fair and my throat started closing up. Smoking weed always helped in those situations. Even though I knew that my weed habit would be considered "cool" in high school populace, I still wasn't ready to share that part of myself with anyone.

But graduation was coming and I felt anxious. Like that feeling of being on the cusp of a great hypothesis in a science experiment. Except this time the hypothesis was the starting point of the rest of my life.