Flames [Slow Updates]

Part Three: The Time of the Hopeless

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who had everything she needed and more, but she didn't appreciate it. She wasn't a good little girl who wished for only a little either, she was a selfish little girl and the list of the things she thought she needed was quite long, which puts into perspective the number of things she did have. But, like all greedy people, she constantly wished for more. 

When the little girl started school at first, she went to a big private school far from her house. Her daddy thought that it was a very good school, and he spent a fortune on it. When the little girl joined, she thought that because she was important and good and wonderful, the other kindergarteners would fall over themselves to try and be her friends.

She couldn't have been further from the truth. 

Maybe she looked sweet and kind. The others played with her at first. Some of them were unusually patient for five year olds. But, slowly and surely, as she kept taking and taking and never gave anything back, they deserted her and she was left all on her own.

For three years, in kindergarten and first grade and second, the little girl suffered. No one spoke to her if they could help it. No one played with her at recess, invited her over for playdates or called her for birthday parties. Even when the little girl threw her own party, everyone suddenly became busy, visiting their cousins or spring cleaning their vacation houses in Nantucket. No one showed up.

It was really because of boredom that she started sketching dress designs. She would create lavish, impossible creations of silks and stiff velvets during recess, in the times she had nothng to do but watch eevryone else run around and have fun. She'd imagine herself in them, attending balls every other night and dancing until dawn. (Of course, being a third grader, the necessity of sleep did not occur to her.) But for her, it wasn't about dancing with princes and living Disney dreams. No, for the little girl, it was all about making the other girls jealous.

She'd go on sketching and sketching, her dreams and stacks of paper constantly growing larger. Finally, her father discovered them. They proved to be her way out.

After the little girl won her first contests, she recieved an envelope saying that she had won a seat at a special school. Her father was pleased. And so, she started fourth grade.

To her new classmates, she appeared outgoing and funny. She got around her school quick enough, and within a week everyone in elementary school knew who she was. She surrounded herself with followers, and by the time the school year was half over, she had the grade in her grasp.

The little girl had a way of making people think that her approval was the highest honour anything or anyone could recieve. She also had a knack of having people believe that whatever she did was the right thing to do, and she got away with a lot of things because of it. As the years wore on, her life came to symbolise perfection. People chose to stop looking past the superficial, and soon, she did too.

Eventually, as it had to, it all shattered. She left the real world, in which she had cultivated an artificial life for herself, for a world that was so bizzare that it couldn't be true. It was in this world that she realized that she was not important, whatever she had led herself to believe over the years. It was here that she realized that with the fancy trappings gone, she was nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

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I know this is not a chapter, but it wasn't intended to be. 

So. I haven't updated in a while, but I'm about halfway through with the next proper chapter. It'll be updated soon. Thank you so much for sticking with Flames so far, despite the infrequent updates. I'll be posting frantically over the next to months, because I intend to finish this soon and move on. 

As always: vote, comment, or (even better) vote then comment. 

-RedSlippers