all the stars

~ prologue ~

     I'm Asteria Kensington. Yup. You read that right. I've got a really weird name, I know. I've never met anyone else with it and don't exactly plan to. Let's just say that when my mom was pregnant with me, she went through a really weird Greek mythology phase and she was obsessed with it all. My best guess is that one random night she was sitting with my dad outside and looked up at the stars and said, "Let's name our baby Asteria." They could've named me Athena, Hera, maybe even Calypso. But no. They named me after the one who is probably the most uncommon and the least popular goddess of all time. Asteria, the goddess of the galaxy and all the stars it contains. Cool flex, but then again, not really. Now that I've spent an entire paragraph just rambling on and on about the weirdness surrounding my name, let's get into the important stuff. 

     My parents are rich. A fact I absolutely hate. My dad is a pretty famous surgeon and my mom is a psychiatrist. A "shrink" to some of you out there. (Okay, probably most of you.) Now you can probably understand the freakish way in which my name was chosen. I do love my mom, I swear, but... well... she's a bit weird. Like a lot. It's not like my mom and I interact much anyway. Or my dad for that matter. They have always been more married to their jobs rather than each other. That brings us to my sister. Allegra Kensington. I like to refer to her as the "golden" child. She not only got the relatively normal name, but she is also the favorite. She's a model and is popular for her age. So, this of course, means she has always been like 100X prettier than me, she's had so many boyfriends I stopped counting, and she's the only one who can successfully gain our parents attention. She's always been the one my parents expected me to look up to, but it's just not possible. I'm simply not her. I've only ever had one boyfriend and it did not end well. I guess you could say I'm decently pretty, but I'm nothing like my sister. She's runway gorgeous. I'm just the non-popular honors student who has a few friends. Well, had few friends. Oh, yeah, did I forget to tell you? Apparently my parents were harassed and blackmailed and whatnot by all these money hungry people and they threatened to do awful things in exchange for a loaded check. Thankfully, it was nothing super serious and they were caught, but my parents took the situation much more dramatically than anyone else. Now we know longer live in L.A., but instead we live in the middle of nowhere on 100 acres in the state of Vermont. Crazy, right? I used to think so too. It was hard enough for me to make friends because of my family before, you can only imagine now. Now I attend Lake Champlain Union High School and I get to start all over. New slate. Since my parents are hiding out right now, Allegra doesn't exactly get to share her popularity with the school, which I'm grateful for. Maybe I won't be completely in her shadow this time. Anyway, enough about me. This isn't entirely my story after all. It's our story.