Stars

The first time I learned to hula hoop was when I was a young girl, about five years old.  It was a warm summer day and the sky was a wide expanse of blue and the grass under my feet was an emerald green. It was the perfect day to be outside and play, but that, my friends, is neither here nor there. No, this story is not about me, it's about a girl. A little girl, to be more specific, by the name of Scarlett Durwood who was five and three-quarters years old and had an adventurous spirit.  

She lived in the small town of Beachwood Valley, at address 513 Gracebury Drive, with her mother and father, like many other little boys and girls.  She had a particularly boring life, in her small cottage, with the same daily routine. Her mother would wake her in the morning to get ready at exactly 7 o'clock sharp. Then Scarlett would drag herself to the closet and pick out her clothes and she would get dressed.  After that she would pad into the bathroom and brush her dark black hair and her teeth. Her mother dropped her off at school at 9 o'clock in the morning and picked her up at 3:30 in the afternoon every day.

Scarlett grew tired of this routine, not all at once, but over time. She sometimes even believed that her parents weren't hers at all. She had enough evidence, or so she thought. Her parents lacked her sense of adventure and discouraged her own. "Scarlett, you must stop with this 'adventure' nonsense," they would tell her in a stern voice. She also looked nothing like either of her parents. Her mother was short and heavy, with wavy light brown hair and dark golden eyes. Her father was very, very tall and had a medium build, with cool blue eyes. Scarlett fit neither of their descriptions, being as skinny as a twig and medium height, with jet black hair and skin the color of moonlight.  Whenever she would make such accusations they would sigh and give her the same response. "You were born on January the 6th at 7:24 in the morning, at Beachwood Community Hospital, to Lilith and Kurt Durwood." Once, after this automatic response, she asked to see her birth certificate, to which her mother angrily told her it had been destroyed in a house fire when Scarlett was a baby. That was always an odd answer to Scarlett because she hadn't remembered any fires or seen any of the effects on the house, but she never asked again, afraid of her mother's rage. At night she would lay in bed looking out her window at the stars above, imagining an adventure that someday she would find herself in. Every night she would dream a new and exciting endeavor but they all had one common thread, Scarlett was someone else's child.  

As Scarlett grew up she knew there was nothing she could do to change the life she lived or the parents she had, so she gave up being the adventurous child she once had been. The day after Scarlett had turned 10 her parents had started fighting. They were terrible fights that would leave the house wrecked and young Scarlett crying and shaking in her closet.  When she turned 13 she made the mistake of trying to stop them. The E.R. staff hadn't quite believed she had fallen out of a tree she was climbing, but sent her on her way. When she returned home with a bandaged re-located right shoulder, her father's car was gone and her mother was crying in her room. She tried to sneak past the door to her mother's room, but as soon as she stepped in front of it, the door flew open.

"THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT," she roared down the hall. Scarlett ran from the house and hid behind the massive oak tree in the front yard just in time. Her mom ripped the door open and scanned the lawn. "Good riddance," Scarlett thought she heard her mumble. 

Scarlett never had many friends, and she definitely never had any she could go to tonight.  She staggered down the street to the bus stop, and plopped onto the bench. Rubbing her aching shoulder, she leaned her head back up to the stars.  Had those really been the same stars she looked up to every night as a child?  She felt a tear slide down her face, but she didn't brush it away.  The next thing she knew she was laying on the bench with her coat bundled around her.  The only sense of familiarity she had were the stars above, and with that she drifted off to and endless dreamland.