1. Charlie
Charlie Anderson stormed out of his house, slamming the door behind him. His brown eyes were burning with fury and his fists were tightly balled. His brown hair was flopping sadly in the drizzle of August rain that had begun to fall. He boiled inside and stomped his feet heavily in the puddles along the path, which in hindsight would have been best avoided, as mud sprayed up the back of his trousers.
He just couldn’t believe his mother would actually get engaged to someone as excruciatingly arrogant and brainless as Shaun Charles. Seriously. While his mum had been telling him the news in the kitchen, Shaun was leant against the wall grinning his head off. You’d have thought he’d just stopped global warming or something.
He was thin and tall, pale and slightly slimy. He had curly dark brown hair which often flopped around in a rather wet way. His eyes were cold and icy, like an arctic ocean, in a thin pale face.
And that was only part of the problem. It was bad enough that his mum was getting married to the complete idiot who was Shaun, but what was worse was that it was so soon after the death of her previous spouse, Charlie’s dad. He had only died three months ago, in May, in a train crash which had killed twenty seven people.
This had just left him, his mum and his four year old sister Gwen, to grieve and pull their lives back together. However, dating and now marrying Shaun Charles did not count, in Charlie’s opinion, as putting a life back together.
Shaun seemed to spend his life winding Charlie up. There was not a single thing that he did that didn’t make Charlie want to strangle him. The worst thing was that it seemed deliberate. It was almost as if Shaun were trying to make Charlie go crazy.
The infuriation and tension inside him was building. At any moment, he knew it would snap. He could feel it. He came to the front gate of his house. Several hundred yards down the road he could see a happy couple, laughing as they sheltered from the rain under a bus shelter. Ugh. It was too much. The anger grew to new heights, and it was instantaneous.
BOOM.
