Vanity Teens

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One:

My day started so beautifully: two brisk, harsh knocks that may well have broken down my bedroom door if beaten any harder. I shot up immediately, still dazed from my dreams. Well, they were probably closer to nightmares than anything else. But the details of my nightmare was slowly slipping away, like they usually do, and the more I tried to remember what I was dreaming, the quicker it left my mind. All I remembered was Lana Del Rey screaming at me, and it was enough to make me cry.

"Who the fuck is it?" I screamed, angrily storming from my bed. I pulled the sheets way with such flamboyant anger that I felt like Tyra Banks.

My eyes immediately fell to the mirror that hung parallel to my bed, and I growled. It is obviously impossible for me to look bad, but I didn't look good. My hair was all over the place, and I hated it when people just went with that I'm-so-cool-I-don't-need-to-style-my-hair look because it was ugly, uncool, and only suited people that were so sexy in the face that everything else didn't even matter. I could only think of one person that it worked for, and he was so unaware of how sexy he was that he was looking at himself in the mirror right now, hating how tousled it looked.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm so talking about me.

I matted it down quickly and screamed a few more vulgar japes towards my mother, who found it was fine to swing open my bedroom door and stand there, hands-on-hips, judging me.

"Get out, Mother, I'm indecent!" I told her. But she refused.

"Oh, please Ariel. Everything you are was made out of me, and all in under seven months. That alone should explain my radiance."

"Yeah, but I was three months premature, and surrogated, now fuck off!" I slipped on a pair of acid-washed skinny jeans and found my favourite jumper. It was black and white, so very comfortable, and plastered with my favourite Victorian Baroque pattern.

I loved Victorian patterns, my Baroque especially, but not as much as I loved florals. I owned like fifty different floral jumpers, I even owned a floral bag. But every time I wore them, Vienna would turn to me and say "Ari, you're wearing my Grandmother's curtains." Of course, my reply to her every time was,"I don't care, I make them work better than she did."

Luckily, Vienna didn't have an opinion on my Baroque jumper. Well, she did, but it was so very racist. She insisted that the pattern looked like I was wearing a deformed man-burqa.

"I smell India whenever you wear that, and I don't mean India Levington from our English class," I could hear her saying. I kept telling her that Baroque was an Italian pattern, not an Indian one, but she insisted it was too foreign to be European.

"It looks like some foul contortion of India, Egypt, and the great, peaceful state of Pakistan. Eugh!" And then she began screaming insults on how Indians immigrants suck the rich blood of Britain, and ruin the world with their stinky servings of curry. I kept telling her how racist she sounded, but she didn't care.

Her often response was, "Racism isn't real, it's a state of mind." That was her answer so so many things. "Love isn't real, it's a state of mind," was something she liked saying more than she should, but my favourite was," Religion isn't real, it's a state of mind." I agreed with that one.

I scowled at my mother pettily, as she looked me over in my bedroom. She was being extra bitchy this morning, and it was starting to piss me off. "Just because your my mother, it doesn't give you permission to stand there when I'm changing! What if I was stark naked?"

Her face stared blankly at me, before she replied, "Ariel, I'd be surprised if you could show me something on your body that I haven't already seen." And then she turned and walked out.