barely tolerable

A Prussian Blue Dress

Part One

Beacon Hills is the name of the town that our story is set. A quiet, tired town that resides in deep California where the sharp mountains peak on the East side and the far distant sea of San Francisco rides out to the West. In some cases, you would call it the typical suburban place where the summers are increasingly hot and the winters bring a harsh cold. The kind with only one high school and no college. The kind that ignores all of its flaws. The kind with a place for the rich, and a place for the poor. The kind of place that's people are all two faced and with one hint of gossip would turn their back on another.

Beacon Hills is a shallow, suburban, small town.

For many, that is how Beacon Hills is labelled.

It was late August. On these summer days the sun settled high in the sky, heat beating down onto the ground below. School had just begun for another year and for the students, it was unbearable with the air conditioning broken. Some workers were forced to stay at home after offices had closed with the unbearable heat. Stores had mostly sold out of electrical fans and ice cubes, people desperate for any excuse to be able to cool down and the trees were slowly drying out. There had been around ten millimetres of rain across the stretch of the whole summer, nothing more, nothing less and the ground was beginning to completely shrivel with thirst as a drought settled in.

But, this story is starting somewhere else.

Imagine that it's 7:35pm on Friday 30th of August and the sun is just setting into dusk. Imagine that we are in the rich part of town where detached houses with flowery front gardens and black doors loom over the streets. Imagine that we are watching over the current dining room of 76 Freshfield Road and it's inhabitants. Imagine that this particular house is made with a dysfunctional and unrelated family, brought together by a relationship between two adults, each with a child. Imagine that this house is complicated and has white siding on its outside walls. Imagine that there is a bright orange bicycle presented on the grass lawn, laying on it's side. Imagine a rusty old 98' baby blue jeep and a black shiny car parked on the grey concrete driveway. Imagine a shiny black door with the number '76' printed in gold. Imagine all of that, and then we can begin.

The dining room was a square room with cream walls and an oak floor that shone beneath the light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the protection of a lamp shade. There was a table in the centre that was made of dark wood and in the corner was a black grand piano. The dining room wasn't all that much to look at and they all knew it was only used on formal occasions. But for some reason, the parents of the house insisted that it be used tonight. Six chairs were settled around the table but currently, only two were inhabited.

One, by a seventeen year old fiery redhead who insisted her hair was strawberry blonde. She had strong green eyes that hid the sharpest of secrets and a stubborn personality that anyone who met her could see straight away. She was intelligent and creative, and absolutely despised the boy sat to her right.

He was a chestnut haired whiskey eyed boy who had just turned eighteen less than a week ago. He was smart, not like her but more in a sarcastic way that got him into trouble a lot. Nonetheless, he was intelligent and could feel the tension radiating off of her. He had a signature smirk that threw all the girls under a bus. To describe him, some would use the term 'fuckboy'.

His name was Stiles. And her name, was Lydia.

Let me just be clear in saying that these two were not related, at all. The only thing that joined them together was the fact that their parents were dating and had been for six months. But it was six months that the two had grown to hate each other in and it was six months that they had both grown tired of.