Locks and Keys

Chapter 1

"Hurry up, Key or you'll be late for school!" My mum shouted up the stairs. I rolled my eyes in protest before calling back- 

"Coming, Mother! Gosh, keep ya hair on." 

 "Oi, you, no more of your sass, I am your mother and you'd best respect that." She replied as I bounded down the stairs towards her grinning face. I heard my brother's voice calling from the kitchen. 

"Has Key got her sassy pants on again? You should kick her out, Mum, no one would miss her." 

 "Hey, Lock, why are you such a freak? Everyone knows you still wet the bed." I called back in reply. 

"News flash, sis, we are twins! If I'm a freak, that makes you one too!" 

"News flash, bro! We aren't identical twins, that means we are different. If we were identical, you would have a uterus!"

 My brother and I had always done this to each other, bullied one another without an end. Our mother, Jane always said it was just so we could get our parent's attention, but I knew it was just sibling banter. Our mother had nick-named us Lock and Key from a young age. Lock was short for Locki, but she always said it was because my twin had always locked away his feeling into himself, and I had always been able to unlock them, ever since I was a child. 

My real name was Vanessa, but all my family and even my friends called me Key. We both had our parents blue eyes, but he had dark, straight hair, whereas mine was curly and dirty blonde. He was tall, like our father, Mark, standing at nearly six foot three and I had an average hight of five foot five. In my eyes, Lock has always been handsome, but he was always too studious to notice the girls that batted their lashes when he walked past or the constant flirtation from my girl friends and all other girls for that matter, that I had to endure when he was around. 

But, he had been my best friend for my whole life, we were practically inseparable, despite the constant bickering. We had been told by friends we were like an old married couple, but that's just totally ew, 'cause incest much? 

We had always been close, to be honest, our whole family was close, from our parents strong relationship, to the love between all the kids. Our parents had been famous for always having kids, since they were first married, they had fostered kids, until they had had my brother and me. Since then, we had adopted three other kids and fostered many more, who were already long gone. The five of us, with Locki and I being the oldest at seventeen, Jamie, who was originally from Nepal, was two years younger than us. We had adopted him five years ago when we had gone on holiday to Nepal to help with building school houses. 

Then there was Lucy, who we had adopted into our family when her parents, some of our parents good friends died in a car accident four years ago and had left us with full guardianship. She had only been six when they died, so was ten now. 

Finally, there was little Jo-Jo, who was three and found abandoned at a restaurant near our hotel in Texas, America, when she was only six months old. We had gone there on a family road trip when Mum found her. Obviously, she went to the police first, but then requested we adopt her, so after a mountain of paper work, she became a Carroll, just like the rest of us were. 

 We had just moved back to England, after living in America for the past three years since we had found Jo-Jo. It had taken half of that time for the adoption to file through, with us not being US citizens and whatever, but now we had moved back to London, so that Lock and I can finish off our final year of school and A-Levels, which is such a cliche of the whole, new girl in town, but who cares, maybe I was a walking cliche, but that wasn't of my making, as I always say, blame the parents. It was the first day of our final year in the education system before university. 

As we were in Sixth Form, we didn't have to wear the stupid uniform, that the lower years of the school did, so I had on a patterned maxi skirt and white vest top with 'In the moment' written in bold on the front. My outfit was tied together with a pair of ankle boots and a bracelet my parents had given me for my seventeenth birthday, which also happened to be my favourite."

You ready to go?" Lock asked me, jingling his keys in my face. 

"Yep, lets get a move on then." I replied, pushing him out the door. First day at a new school, yippee.