Hurricane

Can't Stop This

Copyright © 2012 Alaska May

Dinner at the Hamptons sounds like some sort of comedy movie – like Dinner for Schmucks, or maybe even Meet the Fockers – but it isn’t. Nothing like that at all, in fact it isn’t like anything other than Dinner at the Hamptons. Really, it’s quite scary.

Not what you expect of a family dinner at six thirty in the evening. To state the obvious, it wasn’t the cooking that was scary. The cooking was rather good. It was rare that left over food was shoved into the bin and it was usually to prove a point or out of stubbornness that there was left over food. The family didn’t sit down to eat wearing horrific Halloween costumes or jump out from underneath the table at each other. They weren’t vampires that drank blood and ate the breasts and legs of humans instead of chickens. The scary thing was what went on, what was said at the dinner table. Or not said.

Usually family tables had conversation throughout dinner, parents asking children about their day or what they were doing at the weekend and so on. The Hampton family didn’t have this. Their table was silent except for the sound of members of the family reaching for the sauce, salt or vinegar as others started to cut up the cod that was on there plate.

Friends visiting had always excused themselves to go home after dinner, the awkward silence after Mrs Hampton asked if they were enjoying their day with their friend too much for them. Friends who had been before always knew to make sure that they got away before the food was served.

It had been like this for as long since the girl, who had had such an effect of Pavilion Academy today, had come home and refused to speak to her parents three years ago. Her off-school younger brother had texted her at lunch to say that Mr and Mrs Hampton had taken her ill dog to the vets, to be put down. This, in the eyes of the oldest Hampton child, was unacceptable.

For three days she had only answered their questions with one word answers and only asked them things that she couldn’t go without asking. It wasn’t a tradition not to talk or in memory of the dog that they kept their silence. They just had nothing to say to one another. And to the girl it was a blessing on occasion.

This way she didn’t have to come up with lies to cover the truth. That she attended raves regularly whilst in America and just generally became the child her parents had warned her about. Of course, they knew she wasn’t an angel but she would have been titled the devil if they knew the whole truths.

Scarlett Hampton didn’t see the point of letting people know where she was. It was her life and she could be where she wanted within it; a liable excuse in her own mind. When she had voiced this to her parents during one of their long winded, always won by the child, arguments they had been outraged and grounded her. Her parents got outraged a lot and she got grounded a lot.

However, even though if you added up all the times she had been grounded you would come to the accurate conclusion that she had been grounded since she was thirteen. Every night since she as thirteen to the present and she was meant to be stuck indoors.

Here was where the slightly problem came in. The grounded girl didn’t follow the rules of her grounding. Not once had she followed the rules. She saw them more as guidelines and even then they didn’t guide her.

The oldest Hampton child was constantly out in the evenings, and violated every rule of her grounding every day. She had once been caught sneaking back in at four in the morning, on a school night, by her father and he had told her that tomorrow night she would definitely not be going anywhere. Nothing could stop her though. That was her response and when the next evening came about she was already gone before they could call her back from leaving the dinner table early.

And they realised, nothing would ever stop her.