Vampire Weekend

Introduction

 My name’s Anna Fitzpatrick. I am a human. 6 months ago I would have thought of this as something you never say out loud. Something all of us know is true. Something all of us ARE. But I was a fool back then. Just a little 16 year old with dreams bigger than the sky, trying to break out of the cage I was put in. For me, the little house on the coast of San Francisco I lived in with my aunt and brother was just an obstacle, a piece of wood that stood in the way of my professional journalism.

I was about to become a star, as bright as the one I looked at every night from my window. A star neither I nor my Wimbledon high school could afford. Instead, I was just one of the 173 seniors that walked through its green hallways. Long blonde hair tied in two braids and crimson eyes never seemed to ring a bell to anyone. I can’t say it was always like that. It was different, back when my parents were still together and I was in my old high school. Everybody knew me. Girls wanted to be me and guys wanted to be with me. I was so blinded with the attention that I couldn’t see that everything wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even close.

 We started to loose money when dad got fired from his company. I couldn’t see that because I still felt all my Gucci skirts and sweaters safely on me. Then mom and dad started having this long midnight  ,,talks” that were apparently so serious they had to involve yelling and tears, at best. But still, I couldn’t hear any of them because of my own long midnight talks on the phone with my ,,girlfriends” and ,,boyfriends”. Then, they just split up. As much as a shock it was for me, for my brother, it wasn’t. He DID feel all the money loss and he DID hear all the talks that were raging in the night for hours. He was there, all alone, expecting the obvious for days and days. He prepared himself, as much as a 9 year old can prepare for such things. I didn’t.

 Maybe that’s why I changed so much. Because of the guilt. It was eating me for months, moths I spent in my room de-socializing and saying NO to everything and everyone, months I looked after Alex like he was made out of glass, like he could break if I let him go, months I cried like never before.

 After that, our aunt Penny took us and we moved to the sunny coast, leaving our mom, who we were supposed to live with before she started drinking so much that the court forbid her to raise us, dad, who was somewhere on the other side of the world with his ,,new family”, and my shiny popularity behind forever. From that point my life moved on, it seemed, without me. I turned into an outsider, I didn’t talk much, didn’t make friends, didn’t have boyfriends, everything was safe. But after a year, safe became boring, and writing was my only escape. Soon, even that couldn’t save me from wishing my old life back. So I started my 16 year of life with only one wish: for something to happen…