Fresh Start.

Chapter 1

Growing up in a small town is never easy. Whatever you do people find out about it, and rumours spread like wildfire. So it’s pretty easy to be socially outcast, simply because everyone knows everything about everyone else. All people seemed to do is gossip about each other, and that was not something I liked to do. Sue me for having moral principles, one thing you should know about me is that I always try to do the right thing. So I didn’t fit in with the popular group in school, actually to be honest I didn’t really fit in with any group. I say the thing about the rumours because when I was fourteen, news got out that I had let Jared Downs touch my breast, which never happened, we were each other’s first kiss and that’s as far as it went. Apparently Jared had told some of his friends that he got to second base and they told some of the girls and someone’s parents found out and called my mom and that’s when I had the talk, which was pretty traumatizing, especially since it came from my dad. Not a conversation a fourteen year old wants to have with anyone, let alone their dad.

Now my dad is not the most intimate and affectionate of people, he is more of a high five than a hug kind of guy, after my parents got divorced; my mom had told me that he had really wanted a boy. So he was just a tad disappointed when they found out they were getting a girl.

Looking back now I can see why my parents’ marriage didn’t work out, they were totally different people and they both had extremely huge egos, and they did butt heads when I was young but nothing major. Looking at the pictures of my parents when they first got married and after I was born, they actually looked really happy, especially in this one photo of them in Amsterdam in about 1986 it’s my favourite picture of them, so the thought of them ever having problems would never even cross your mind. And the divorce came as a surprise to everyone but me, because I was caught in the middle of WW3. When they first started fighting it was hard for me because I was usually always there for the fights and they could be quite loud. I was in a bad place until I invested in a pair of noise cancelling head phones and loaded my I-pod, which never left my side, with songs that were loud enough to drown them out and stuff that wasn’t too depressing.

I also enrolled in as many after school activities as possible so that I could stay away from home for as long as possible. I joined yearbook which got me into photography, I then became the editor of the school newspaper, so that got me into writing, I was also vice captain of the swim team, but in our school if you weren’t a cheerleader, baseball, football or soccer player you were non-existent. So I flew pretty much under the popular radar, lucky for me. Until the actual divorce, then I was no longer just a face in the crowd… I was THE face in the crowd, teachers pitied me, girls gossiped and laughed behind my back and apparently I was the one to blame for the divorce. Which came as a surprise to me, because I told my parents I wanted nothing to do with their marital problems. When I asked my mother why? She said ‘they didn’t connect anymore’.

I was actually kind of sick and tired of my mom’s constant problems and ‘poor me attitude’ when, a year after my parents’ divorce, my mom decided to ship me off to my dad and step-mom, who was eight months pregnant, five hundred miles away…

I was actually kind of relieved. Now most teenagers in this situation would go in to a deep state of depression and start listening to heavy metal, wearing “gothy” make-up and rebelling against their parents just to get their own way and end up failing dismally. Call me crazy but, that sounds like a too much of a mission and a waste of freaking time. So I embraced the change and quite frankly I was looking forward to the fresh start, not because I wasn’t happy living with my mom. It was fine living with her but whenever something was wrong she would say things like “if I wasn’t divorced this would never have happened.” That was her excuse for absolutely everything…and when she was married she would say “If I hadn’t married your father then I… ” and she would insert a possibility of how her life could have turned out here. As a conciliation prize for surviving the constant battle of my parents I was given gifts and trinkets from both parties. Often it would be extra allowance, which I had nothing to spend it on so I took an empty shoe box and each time I was given money I would place most of it in the shoe box and every now and then I would take a bit out and treat myself, until one day I walked into this pawn shop and I saw it straight away, a cannon D5000, I fell in love instantaneously. I told the nerdy looking guy behind the register not to sell it to anyone, and that I would be back in about twenty minutes. . I jumped in my car, a VW beetle (retro I know) her name was Poppy because she has the tendency to back fire, and raced home and grabbed the box and hurried back to the shop and bought the camera. I even kept the till slip.