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Marnie Cooper was cheeky. In fact, Marnie Cooper could be a very spiteful girl. She was the type of person most people tried not to pick a bone with, because 9 times out of 10, you'd walk away with your feelings hurt - bonus points if tears were streaming down your face. She could be nasty.
Call it a self-defence mechanism - you hurt her, she hurt you, she did it without thinking. She was really quite a joy to be around if you were her friend, she was funny and lively and could be extremely caring - she'd a good heart, always had, but the girl always seemed to get caught at a bad time. She meant well, but people tested her patience . . more specifically, people in school . . a place she hated . . a place she spent 5 days out of the week at . . so was it really any wonder she was always so moody?
As of tomorrow, she went to Ackley Bridge. Marnie did alright in school, she wasn't a straight-A student but she did better than most pupils in her year, mainly because maintaining good grades meant keeping her parents off her back and out of the way. Kathy and Dee Cooper were hard-working people to put it nicely, but to Marnie, well, she put them down to workaholics who wouldn't be able to tell you their own house number - and if they didn't know their house number, then they were sure as hell clueless about the antics their daughter got up to on the daily - cut to Marnie laying out cold in a park with a litre bottle of Vodka in her hand.
They had a nice house to put it simply, but in order to keep that nice house, this pair of parents had to work.
Dee was a construction manager which basically meant he was forever maintaining buildings or finding land to make new ones, and Katherine was an ambulance dispatcher, working 12-draining-hours most nights. She usually came home when Marns was just off to school and left again when she got back, so they hardly seen each other, and if they did when Kathy was off for a weekend, Marnie felt as though she had to tip-toe around her mother if she seemed the slightest bit traumatised after week-long shifts (a past lesson learned) so, she would leave the woman to enjoy her own company in her bedroom watching her soaps. Because she was the parent she saw the most, she tried to appreciate the smallest bit of time she saw her and didn't try so hard to pick a fight with her, although it could be hard at times, she simply left her mother to her own devices if it meant no tension in the house.
Marnie was very appreciative of her home, she saw what kinds of neighbourhoods her friends lived in and in the nicest way possible - she didn't know how they managed. Her family sure as hell weren't rich, their house was not something special and Marnie had to work a job as well to have nice things for herself, but it did have a front and back garden, as well as a driveway, and that was more than what most people in her school had. But the family had to work to keep that lovely home, and in all honesty, sometimes Marnie had wished they lived in a small, terraced house if it meant seeing her mum and dad more often, even if they weren't always joyful to come home to.
