Not Your Typical Wallflower

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Happy (NOT) Birthday

August was unseasonably warm, if warm is even the appropriate word. Sweltering? Blistering? Red-hot? Scorching? Add all of them into a word-soup with about 14 other synonyms and you have the summer that preceded and included August 13th, my 17th birthday. I wasn't feeling very jolly, seeing that it was also the first day of my junior year, the first day that my blessed routine of laziness would be broken.

Needless to say, that morning I clung to sleep in those last precious moments before 7:00AM. A shrill voice woke me and I managed to comprehend that it was my mother before I hurled an alarm clock at her head.

"Happy birthday, Violet!" A miniature cake, cut to look like a flower, was waved in my face. The color scheme was, of course, purple. Note to parents: naming your child after a color is bad enough; don't make it worse by making every birthday cake the color you named them after.

"I'm so surprised," I offered with a half-smile. I felt shitty, but the satisfied smirk that painted my mother's face was worth the torment of faking interest at such an ungodly hour. My mouth felt dry and my head throbbed along with my heartbeat. Strands of sweat-soaked hair clung to my face and I pushed them away.

"It's too early for cake, of course, but this will be in the fridge for you when you get home." My mother was the epitome of normal. She had the bright green shirt (with matching gardening gloves), white shorts, and the complete inability to see that her husband was screwing around with his business partner (a floosy named Bettina). It warmed my heart, to see a genuine smile on her well-worn face, so I stuck my thumb in the cake and popped it into my mouth.

She gasped and reared the cake away from me. "Violet! Did you just stick your finger in the cake!?" I suckled the icing from my thumb and shrugged innocently.

"What can I say? I can't resist your cakes." That made her smile, but she tried her utmost to hide it. I saw it, though – the lightening of her crystal-blue eyes, the slight upward tilt of her lips. I always saw such dullness in those eyes. It was beautiful to witness them all lit up.

"Control yourself, for goodness sake! You're seventeen now – practically an adult. You can't go shoving your dirty fingers into your future birthday cakes."

"I wish everyone would quit calling me an adult," I grumbled, rising from bed. "I'm still a teenager, which is not an adult." I kissed her on the cheek and then sauntered toward the bathroom, calling behind me, "Anyway, I can't be an adult when I'm momma's little girl, right?"

I could practically hear her beaming with satisfaction, and I grinned as I closed the bathroom door. The day had great potential to be an utter disaster, so I determined to minimize that chance by looking presentable. When the temperatures skyrocketed in July, I chopped off my long red hair. Dragging a comb through it was easy. My skin was fairly clear and, thanks to the summer, a sun-kissed shade that made me a notch above "pale as a ghost." I threw on a sleeveless orange tank-top, a pair of shorts, and filled a water bottle.

It was like Satan's ass-crack outside.

My shoes were untied as I scooped up my backpack and headed for the door. I made a mental note to remedy that issue and started walking down my street, through the weaving neighborhoods and toward the bus stop.

At seventeen, I was old enough to drive a car. Unfortunately, I wasn't wealthy enough to own one. While my family didn't struggle to make ends meet, I definitely wasn't living in the lap of luxury. My parents rented a three-bedroom house on the boring side of town. The public school nearby had computers, but they were slow, and the library was comparable to a janitor's closet. The teachers were over-worked, the students were over-zealous, and the quiet were over-looked.