What Game Will You Play

Chapter 1

(Edited)

I have cleaned the main bedroom, guest bedroom, kitchen, and living room, practically the whole house. And now, just as I am about to finish, she wants me to leave what I am currently working on, the dining room, and clean her pool house. The old lady doesn't even use the pool house.

Ms. Betty has always been an odd one when it came to cleaning her house. I have worked for the seventy-four-year-old woman for about six months, and she still likes throwing curveballs at me.

She writes on the schedule every week what she wants me to clean, and I plan on cleaning it, but when I start to do it, she stops me and tells me she needs me somewhere else. The old lady is lovely and all, but she is definitely not organized, and she should not be making the schedule.

One would think that since the old lady makes such a mess of the schedule, she would have a messy house, but that is untrue. Ms. Betty is one of the cleanest people in town. Every time I go over to clean her house, there are almost no specks of dirt or dust. It is so spotless that I think she does a little cleaning or something before I come over, which defeats the whole purpose of my house cleaning job.

I rush to clean the pool house while still being as thorough as possible. The pool house is beach-themed, so everything is either white or light blue, which makes seeing dirt and dust easier. I start with the vacuum, then mop the floors. After that, I work on cleaning the bathroom, and then I go to work on the small decorative table set she has just for the pool house. Yes, she has a particular table set for her pool house and a more extensive and fancier table set for her main house since one is just not enough apparently.

Once I am finished with the whole pool house, it is almost three o'clock. My work here is done for the day, so I run out of Ms. Betty's house before she can catch me. Ms.Betty is known for her talking. I usually don't have a problem listening to her crazy rants and stories, but today is different. Today I promised my brother Devin I wouldn't be home late.

I quickly walk down the smooth paved road of the town until it turns to dirt. My family's house sits hidden deep in the trees. My great-grandfather built it many years ago and said it was the best work he had ever done.

The house is made of wood and stone. The wooden front door has unique carvings of lines that are so fluent and intricate that it looks like it should be in a museum. The inside of the house contains many rooms, each one with its own handcrafted wooden archway. The house is impressive, and I know I will be disappointed when I move out of it one day.

My great-grandfather helped build and design many of the houses in our town when it was first built fifty years after the war ended. The government of the New World wanted some good to emerge from the bad and decided to construct beautiful towns over the ruins of the old battlefields where many people died. In the end, eighteen towns were built over the most memorable spots.

In the beginning, not much of a battle went on where our town Treegrass is. According to my old history teacher, the event that occurred in this area was primarily a stalemate.

For ten years, men hid behind their walls and trenches, only sometimes shooting at each other until one day, the people of the New World decided to stop hiding and start fighting. All the men agreed to attack at the same time. This took the enemy by surprise and we won, but not without losing many good men.

At the war's end, the government took down the walls that the troops on both sides used to defend themselves and leveled the area to a blank slate. From there, they brought in people to design and make a place for people to live peacefully, my great-grandfather being one of them. Not only did he build our house and some others, but he was also asked to help build the town center, which was a big honor.