Filling The Void

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The first thing seventeen-year-old Eileen Belinda Fowler had noticed when she entered her house was her mother standing in the hallway. She was quite happy on her way back from home as it was the last day of her junior year. She was quite excited to be able to spend summer with Danny—her boyfriend—and just getting a break from school in general. She was never the studious type to begin with; having to study in school was just pure torture for her. The only reason she didn’t drop out of school was because she didn’t want to disappoint her mother, who had been quite passionate about studies at her time. She planned to laze around, read books and eat loads of food all summer long. The first thing she planned to do after coming home was hug her mother. But all that happiness and excitement turned into curiosity when she saw her mother wearing her favorite red earrings; red lipstick; her floor length, sleeveless black dress and a fake smile that never meant good.

“Good afternoon, Mother,” she said as she approached the woman who was double checking herself in the mirror that hung on the right side of the entrance hall of their house—or as Eileen liked to call it, the ‘mouse’ as it qualified as neither a house, nor a mansion.  She hated calling the woman ‘Mother’; she wanted to call her Mom or Momma like she used to when she was little, but the woman had been insistent on being called Mother because she thought it ‘seemed more appropriate for the child of a successful businessman to act prim and proper like her father and address her parents with respect’. Eileen wanted to firstly scream that her mother’s husband was not her father; her father was dead. Then, she wanted to scoff at the stupid excuse of an excuse that her mother presented because it had no logic whatsoever, in her eyes. She also had the urge of pointing out that by addressing the woman by the name of the relationship she had with her, she wasn’t respecting her. In her eyes, she was being formal and distant with the woman who should have been her best friend. But she had never said those things. She chose to stay silent because she didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings and ruin the already-weakened relationship they both shared with one another.

“Darling, Eileen, good afternoon to you, too,” Cassandra Thompson replied. After stealing one last look from the mirror that was mounted in golden framework, she turned her head to see her daughter dressed in jeans and a baggy, red off-shoulder shirt, with locks of her hair escaping her braid, and  wanted to scold her daughter for her attire. She looked like she belonged to some lower middle class family rather than part of the upper class Thompson family. The first thought that crossed her mind was what people would think if she saw her in those, those…she didn’t even know what to call them because they did not pass as clothes. But she simply kept her mouth shut and gave her daughter a radiant smile. It’s only a phase she told herself. She’ll get over it soon enough. Cassandra walked up to her daughter and placed a kiss on both her cheeks before pulling back and trying to subtly pull her locks behind her ear.

Eileen wanted to roll her eyes at that moment. Ever since her second marriage, her mother had become somewhat…artificial. She had suddenly turned into one of those women who actually cared about how they looked and what they did in public. Eileen remembered that, not too long ago, her mother was the woman who didn’t give a fly about appearances. She had practically been a slob before meeting her stepfather and then, all of a sudden, she had become this lady who wore silk nightgowns—that were way, way out of her budget—to sleep and who gave cheek kisses instead of bear hugs. Eileen had been baffled by this sudden change but, deep down, Eileen had known the reason of this sudden turn of events; the reason her mother had kept this act up was because she liked—no, loved—the luxuries that came along with being married to Richard Thompson.