Dedicated to the boy who started it all...
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I am Celeste. This is my story, starting from the very beginning.
I was born into a family of writers. My mother was a picture book writer and my father was a scientific writer. My older sister, Alana, drew pictures. She covered my to-be bedroom walls with a beautiful mural of peacocks and princesses and a swooping pegasus and a big sakura tree and all these beautiful swirls and my name, right in the middle, Celeste. It was like she knew me before I was even born. I have never grown out of my mural.
Why am I Celeste? Why not Claire, like a Clear new idea for a story? Or Paige, a fresh new page?
My parents were like that.
No, I am called Celeste because she was a character in my mother's book. I have read her book many times but I can't find any simalarities between me and the fictional Celeste. Not that I ever really try. Celeste in the book is a simpering, well-mannered girl with ringletty hair from a good family who loves to write.
It's obvious that it's what my parents always wanted me to be.
It's not what they got.
My sister was always a little on the crazy side, but I never knew her properly. She left for arts school when I was very little. I've always thought we could have been the odd ones out together, but that opportunity left long ago, to somewhere in London on the polar oppisite of the world. But when I was four, she sent me back a tiny toy piano with a plinky sound. My parents had bought me enough books and pencils and notebooks to last me a lifetime. If I was in a shop and casually mentioned a book, it was mine, just like that. But other things were usually a different story.
So I would sit in my beautiful bedroom surrounded in books with my little piano in the middle of it all, plinking out tunes. I found some old CD's in Alanas old room and played them on her walkman that she left behind, then slowly plucked out the tunes. By the time I was five I could pluck out the chorus of "Buttercup" and "Girls just wanna have fun". Very, very slowly, but surely.
When I was six, Alana came back for Christmas. She had showed us a whole published book of pictures, like a silent movie on paper. Her career in art was going uphill.
"This is my book, little Celeste. It has won an award. You can do anything you like when you follow your dreams. Can you play on your toy piano yet?"
I showed her my songs. Alana started to cry. She kneeled on one knee.
"You don't have to do what Mummy and Daddy say, Cece. They wanted me to be a writer too. If you want to be a musician, then go for it, Celeste. Just because you come from a big posh house doesn't mean you have to make it proud. Lets do it, Cece. Lets stray from the drab old Park family traditions. We can be the colourful ones. Like the pictures all over your room."
I never forgot Alana's words. She was my most favourite inspiration ever, even if she only came here about every second Christmas. She went on to write more books, and me, I just kept dreaming.
But before she left that Christmas, she painted a new picture on my wall.
A girl with red ringlets plinking on a blue toy piano.
