Prologue
My name is Avalon Weatherby. I'm fourteen and I live in a small appartment at the end of Maple street. My neighbourhood is what you can call peaceful, somewhat tranquil. The streets are hardly used, owing to the new highway that had taken it's business months ago and gangs rarely regulate the place for some reason.
Not that I'm complaining or anything.
I was fine with the quiet. More than fine, actually. After a whole day listening to continuous chatter of the students and the teacher's droning voice on an interminable subject, you'd expect anyone to get tired of noise sometime.
Apparently not.
Our appartment is on the fifteenth floor, coincidentally my favourite number, and if you look at the door next to the second you'll reach my home. The interior isn't exactly what you'd call big, more like... comfy or cosy or comfy. Oh wait, I've said comfy already. Long story short, it's really comfortable. Period.
My sister and I share one room of the three room flat, the smaller one, while my parents share the bigger one, the one farther away from the road. The walls, having been painted by my little sis in the past, were pretty childish with the occasional mutli-coloured handprint at every random interval on the light pink walls.
I loved it.
The room is quite simple with the only furniture in it being our two beds, a desk in the corner (complete with computer and spinny chair), a huge cupboard and a ginormous bookshelf. The cupboard was where I kept my art stuff and the bookshelf was where my sis and I kept our extensive library of books.
My little sister is named Ginny Weatherby, by the way, after that book character my mum had become rather taken to reading. She's four but going onto five in the next few weeks. She has the most adorable chocolate eyes you have and ever will see and she has this way in making anyone fall in love with her the second you see her. (But back off, she's mine) She's a natural brunette and long dark brown hair cascading like a waterfall, straight down her back.
In short, she looks like the total doppleganger of mum from when she, herself, was four. You can tell she'll be a real heart breaker once she grows up.
Anyway, on to my mum. What can I say about her other than she looks like the grown up version of my younger sister and is quite the looker even in her forties. I have to admit, though, she's probably the most cheesiest one of the family, a real romantic. She'll fall for any cliched princess and prince charming plot out there and can often be found at my bookshelf, raiding my romance section with a big dopey grin on her face and hearts in her eyes.
Yeah.
It's quite easy to see how she fell for my dad, though it might not look it at first sight. My dad, unlike my mum, has just about the emotional range of a teaspoon. Occasionally, I'm able to wring out a fond smile from his thin lips but other than that, nada. It's a different story when he's with my mum though. He's like putty in her capable hands, able to be manipulated with a small push or well aimed shove. He treats her like some type of princess royalty and I think it's safe to say that they're still very much in love after all these years. In his school years, I'd bet he was a real heart throb. He has golden blond hair and a good body build from his time playing soccer during high school. He's a whiz at maths and is able to calculate stuff faster than my calculator but is a failure in history. Too boring, he says. Yeah right.
Me? Well, I'm not like my mom, Ms Beauty Queen Elizabeth, or my dad, Heart Throb Extroadinare David. I'm just me. I have sandy blonde hair, that's probably gained from mixing my parent's hair colours together, and sea blue eyes that look like the most beautiful shade of blue ever seen, or so I've been told. Unlike my mum and sis, whose hair styles are straighter than a sheet of flat iron, my hair is a wild mess of waves. On good days, it looks like it's styled to be like that. On bad days... *shudder* let's just say that it's not pretty. On those days, I tend to enlist the help of a cap to keep it at bay. As I've said before, I have a certain obssession with art. I'm good at watercolors and dry pastel, and I'm quite handy at painting but ask me about ink and I've got nothing. I have a secret collection of drawings and sketches and other artworks that have never seen the light of day and, if I ever have my way, never will. I'm insanely shy about my masterpieces and will just about do anything to keep prying eyes away. In other words, no one's ever seen my drawings before. Not even my family.
Also, I love to read and it's kind of not unusual to see me someplace quiet reading a well worn book. It's hard to break me out of those type of trances once I fall in. So far, my favourote author is J.K. Rowling. I admire how she got so far with the help of a pencil and a sheet of paper and I absolutely love Harry Potter. This is the book my sister is named after, by the way.
I go to a local school nearby with my best friend, Trina Style. Strange name, right? Wrong. If you ever meet her, you'll find out that it's the most fitting name out there for her. I swear, if there was a subject that taught fashion, she'd shoot to the top of the class and get straight As every assignment. As it is, she's aspiring to be a fashion designer someday and her secret dream (which is not that much of a secret, to tell you the truth) is to have her own popular clothes line someday, sort of like Gucci or Armani. Course I'm behind her all the way.
Anyway, so that's my family, and my extended family to an extent. Happy group, aren't we? I totally agree.
