Glass Facades

Chapter three

Autumn was beginning, which has always been my favourite season of the year, ever since I was a kid. It's cold outside, you get to wear a thousand layers of clothes and play in piles of leaves. You are never too old to jump in a pile of leaves. And there's hot chocolate and coffee and pumpkin pie. Oh and Halloween! Best holiday of the year, well after Christmas. But after all this years Christmases hadn't exactly been happy times. Most of the times one of my parents was too drunk to even remember it was Christmas. There was no present exchange and even if every year I hoped for a real Christmas it always ended up being me sitting alone in my room drinking bought eggnog.

Meanwhile, Halloween was the perfect excuse to get out of the house and end up drunk. So Halloween had gained many points over the past few years. I wonder if this time it'll be any different.

Christmases with my aunt and cousin were always the absolute best. They were the reason the holiday was so great.

Aunt Amalie made the best cookies in the entire world and no one would ever be able to change my mind about that. Jay and I would play outside in the snow and build The Giant Snowman. It ended up being an actual tradition and everything. We would try to build the biggest snowman in the history of Whiteridge. It all started when aunt Amalie showed us the picture of some kids who years ago had built the largest snowman ever seen in Whiteridge. It was two and a half meters tall and almost two meters wide, and we'd become obsessed with beating them.

There was this one winter, which ended up being especially cold, with more snow than Whiteridge had ever seen in the past twenty-five years. Logan had joined us for that year's attempt at beating the record of the largest snowman.

We worked incredibly hard for weeks, or at least they seemed like weeks. The final result was a three meter tall and two-meter wide snowman in our yard. We were very pleased with the result and they even took a picture of our creation, the three of us standing and smiling in front of it. The picture was even published in the local newspaper. For me, it had always seemed that Whiteridge was a town lost in time.

Anyways, I was getting ahead by thinking of winter and Christmas while I still had all of autumn to enjoy. Well, that was if the police or my parents didn't find me first. But knowing my parents they wouldn't even bother to make a statement to the police about how their kid was missing. And that was fine by me.

Jay and Logan took me around the town and as we walked memories started to flow right back into me.

The old building used as kindergarten which Jay, Logan and I used to attend was no longer a kindergarten and it had been reformed for the mayor's family to move in.

We were walking in front of a clothing store when a familiar old lady walked on the opposite side of the road.

"Nana!" I yelled and ran across the street, an annoyed driver who had to slam on the breaks in order to not run over me honked and drove off very pissed.

The lady turned around to look at me and looked confused for a second before widening her eyes.

"Willow? Is it really you?"

I nodded with a smile and Gina (even though she had always been nana for me) pulled me in for a long hug. She had been my nanny years ago, last time I saw her I barely reached her chest, now I was taller than her.

"Where did my little Willow go?" She asked caressing my cheek."You're a full grown woman now!

"She's a beauty, isn't she miss Palming?

"You better watch yourself Logan, she's out of your league." Nana pointed an accusing finger at the boy who opened his mouth as if to say something but ended up closing it. No one could argue with nana.