Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
09/05/2009
VIENNA REYES HADN'T always been a name people could recall. She hadn't always been the British-American popstar the world portrayed her to be. The girl with the sad songs. The girl with a licence. The girl who blew up overnight.
Her parents weren't much: a chef and a council worker. That had been enough for the small family of three as the adults watched their daughter bloom in the Australian air. Running along the beaches of Brighton, the cityscape of Melbourne fading into the distance. It had been picture-perfect. Almost. Only if you glimpsed.
Vienna's parents would fight a lot. Daily, the girl would hide away in her room upon hearing the angered shouts and yells emerging from the household kitchen. It became routine for her to slide through her window - since she'd removed the flyscreen months ago - and sit on the low brick fence outside her house while she waited for the storm to ease. She would kick her feet and count the blades of grass beneath her to try and drown out the noise. It hardly worked.
Vienna met him on her twenty-fourth excursion towards the brick fence. She had sat down and hummed to herself, glancing away from the plants beneath her for a moment only to lock eyes with a boy across the road. They were in terrifyingly similar positions.
He didn't have a brick fence, he had a wooden fence. His extended taller, the pickets reaching toward the infinite sky. His back was pressed against it. Vienna could imagine the splinters pressing through his thin long-sleeve shirt.
They stared for a while, nobody daring to utter a word, too scared to break the feeling that was finally distracting them from the commotion in their houses. Vienna had always applauded herself for her ability to maintain eye-contact for prolonged periods of time, but the boy somehow matched her skill.
