Assisting Victoria

Part Seven

 I woke up the next morning not so cheery. I could hear my mom complaining again down stairs and yelling at my dad, who had not yet left for work. I rolled out of bed and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was a mess, but I was too tired to actually do much with it, so I resorted to combing it out a little and throwing it back into a messy pony tail.

If there was one things I wasn’t about to do, it was leave my room while my mother was on one of her ranting sprees. The thing I always aimed for was to avoid causing any more problems by staying out of the way. Unfortunately, things didn’t always work out that way for me.

“KELSEY!”

The second I heard my name yelled from down stairs I rolled my eyes and dragged myself out the door and down the stairs. My dad had just left, the door clicking shut quietly behind him as I entered the kitchen, and my mother was standing at the counter making her breakfast. I didn’t say anything, but she must have heard me, because she turned around to look at me.

“Yeah?”

“Did you forget something yesterday?” she asked.

I looked at the sink, but the dishes were done. It couldn’t have been that. I looked around the rest of the kitchen, trying to see what I may have missed, but I couldn’t find anything.

“I don’t know,” I finally answered after my search ended.

“Not in here Kelsey. I told you to take the blankets out of the washer and put them in the dryer for me yesterday when you got home from school. They’re still in the washer. And where exactly were you for dinner last night?”

So she wondered where I was for dinner, but didn’t bother coming to look in my room or anything. Go figure. Truth was though, I wasn’t very hungry last night. Ever since I took off Tori’s jacket all I could smell was the sauce that was on my shirt, and after a while it made me lose my appetite. I never wanted to eat spaghetti again.

“I fell asleep,” I answered.

“You fell asleep.” She rubbed at her forehead. “You have to stop sleeping during the day Kels, or you’re not going to be sleeping at night. How many times have I told you to stop taking naps during the day? And maybe if you hadn’t been sleeping, you would have remembered to….”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I stared at her and nodded every now and then to make her think I was listening, but I what I was really paying attention to was the time on the clock behind her. I could just see it out of the corner of my eye and I could see that I only had about ten minutes left until I went to school.

“I’m going to be late,” I said, cutting off her lecture.

My mother turned around to look at the clock and then turned back to me.

“Well alright. Run along then and get ready. Just remember what I said.”

Well that was going to be a little hard to do since I hadn’t actually been paying attention, but I smiled anyway.

“Yeah of course.”

And with that I hurriedly walked away and went back up to my room to get dressed and grab my backpack.

-

I did end up being a little late for my 1st hour, but Mr. Nelson didn’t seem to care too much. He was one of those teachers that wouldn’t take attendance until the end of the hour. That meant that as long as you showed up, he wouldn’t remember to mark you late. I always liked that, because if I was going to be late for any hour, it was always 1st hour.

“Okay class,” he said as he walked around the room. “I want you to write a three page story for tomorrow about someone in your life that is very important to you and why you chose that person. Don’t worry about making it perfect, because I only want this to be a rough draft. I do however, expect you to try your hardest to make it the best you can with no editing.”

I loved writing assignments. Well, as long as it wasn’t an essay on say, what I learned while reading a history book. Other than that though, writing was something I liked to consider myself fairly good at. I used to write stories a lot when I was in middle school, which was a great way to distract myself from what went on around me, but for some reason I stopped when I hit high school. I guess I just never found the time anymore.

There was only one thing about this assignment that I didn’t like. That was that I didn’t know who I could possibly write about. In the back of my head my voice was screaming “Tori! Tori!” and as much as I wanted to, I didn’t think it would be that good of an idea to write about her.

Sure, she was very important to me, but it was the why part that I’d get stuck on. I couldn’t simply write in my English paper all about my crush on my teacher. What would Mr. Nelson think?

There was Lauren. I could always write about her. After all, she was my only true friend I seemed to left at this point in my life. There was no way I’d be writing about either one of my parents. Though to be fair, my dad wasn’t all that bad. At least when my mom was taking out all of her anger on me and making me feel like I could never do anything right, my dad would be on my side. I just wished both of them paid attention to me a little more.

I guess Lauren it was. I started to write down how she was my best friend and how she had helped me overcome a lot of difficult situations in my life. I then went on to explain about how everyone else had left me behind, but Lauren had always stuck around. Yep, this was going to work. I just had to make it the best thing I’d ever written and hopefully bump up my grade a little, which was starting to lower a little too much on account of the missing papers I had.