Ruined

Chapter one - The second bicycle.

                                                               Chapter one - The second bicycle.

"Noah Thomas Jason Livingham. If you don't get your lazy bum down here in the next thirty seconds and have breakfast, I will drag you down here with my bare hands."

I stirred, groaning in my swamp of sweaty sheets.

"Yale. Yale. Yale. Yale. USA. USA. USA. Conneticut. Conneticut..." I chanted under my breath as I tore my aching and half asleep body from the haven that is my bed. 

That's what I did every morning. I had to.

Suffocation isn't pleasant. Especially when it's your own life that is suffocating you.

I can never honestly say I've ever really felt something - for anyone. I am an automatic machine, with a cog that instantly triggers the response of 'I love you' to my mother, my father, my sister. Every morning. Every evening. Every day.

Never changing. Always the same. Well, untill the cog gets broken of course.

"NOAH!" My mother's voice was reaching screeching point. And I knew better than anyone to never let it reach screeching point.

I shoved open my attic room door and clattered down the two sets of stairs that lead to the kitchen. My fourteen year old sister, Rayna, was neatly spooning up her bowl of cornflakes. Her wavey blonde hair was brushed to perfection, without a hair out of place. She was wearing the ugly bottle-green uniform of Stockerton High. I shuddered as memories of agnonisingly endless boredom resurfaced in my mind. My mother, Sue, was humming in an out of tune fashion under her breath as she washed the dishes mechanically. Her graying, dirt-blonde hair was piled up in a bun, and she was wearing one of her usual faded cotten dresses, carefully concealing any glimpses of cleavage and leg. Then there was my dad, Peter, golloping up my mother's sorry attempt of a fry-up, skimming through The Sun - "The only quality paper out there." Flakes of dandruff were evident on his balding, originally brunette head. Any slight movement caused a few flakes to snow onto the shoulders of his crisp office shirt and spotty tie with the gravey stain.

Just the sight of them made me want to run all the way to Leeds airport and catch a plane, anywhere away from here.

Preferably, Conneticut.

The scene was so perfect, so polished. I truly felt as if I was living in the matrix and that I was Neo... 'The one'. The error in the ridiculous chunk of normal that was the Livingham family.

I hated them. And I hated myself for hating them.

"Noah. I really wish you wouldn't just wear thost disgusting boxer shorts in bed. It's truly unhygienic." Mum chided, waving her dishcloth around violently. I glanced down at my Klein's and shrugged. I noticed Rayna glaring at me with a comtemptious look of disgust upon her features. I grabbed the box of cornflakes from in front of her and shovelled a handful of them down my throat, hoping Mum or Dad didn't see.

"Grow up Noah." Grunted Dad from behind his paper.

I hesitated, waiting for any 'good mornings' or 'how are you's' - the usual stuff you expect to hear from your family in the morning. 

Silence.

"I'm off to have a shower." I announced to no one in particular. I waited. Rayna didn't look up from her pink blackberry as she stabbed at the keys aggresively. Mum began to chalk out the shopping list on the tacky flower pot men black board, nailed up beside the fridge. Dad simply stuffed another egg into his mouth noisily, and washed it down with a slurp of coffee.