Colourless Skies

1. Moorcroft

Leah was just another kid at MHS, trying to live her life to the fullest. Being an average seventeen-year-old girl wasn't enough to fit in. Moorcroft HighSchool was an old, but expensive building located, in the east of the city.

It was a large building, residents claimed that it had been around for many years. No one knew its exact date of opening and nobody gave it a second thought.

It was painted in anchor grey and surrounded by thorny hedges on either side of the wall, the building stood on one of many tall hills. The front of the school was lined with black gates, guarded with spikes. Whenever the sun rose from the east, an eerie aura would overtake the building, as if dipped in shadows.

The school's color cannot be blamed for its dullness. The whole city was in the same state, bland, gloomy, and just as quiet in the day as in the night. Leah, being the new and curious resident in the city had tried to ask of its crumbling history from many, but not one would utter a single word to her, giving her suspicious glares behind her back.

Helen and James, her parents had moved them from Seattle, where she was born, to Moorcroft. Leah never wanted to leave, she had fought over it and ultimately pleaded her parents to not move from the place she had grown to finally love, but they were not to be argued on the subject.

That evening, she finally decided to leave. She ran away, straight into the woods. The result of the two days of living in hiding was her being caught by a search team. One look at her parents set her to tears, their eyes blazed, with anger. They say brutality is rare, but it wins. Getting slapped on her already dirty cheeks wasn't enough for their need to cause pain. Then came the wave of aggression.

After a heavy dose of heated arguments, her mother gripped her arm and threw her in the basement, locking her in.

Being used to it, her eyes had remained dry. After all, this had become her life when she was taken up from an old orphanage at the young age of six. The first time her father had beaten her was when she had tripped and torn her pants, hurting herself. She was twelve. Yet her life forced her into staying quiet.

Although leading such a wretched life, on the streets, she was accompanied by a cheeky smile and a playful ambiance, trying not to let her body and her life come in her way of happiness.

She accepted the fact that she wasn't pretty, being a bit chubby and abnormally tall. But she failed to see her bright blue eyes, they reflected like the ocean itself, and her luscious, beautifully long  black hair. Those were what made her, who she is.

Moving to Moorcroft hadn't been easy, especially with parents like her's. They arrived on a quiet Sunday, the special day when Leah was allowed to go out and do whatever her heart would desire, to be free.

The fact that they had settled in the most obvious, most expensive manor in all of the city, the Moorcroft Manor, turned many faces towards her when she would go out for a walk. Teenagers were her bullies, little kids were scared of her, and adults, the worst, would talk behind her back, about things she knew she wasn't or could never be, but overhearing their conversations didn't help her case.

But being her pretentious self, she pretended to be brave and ignored the voices until they were but whispers in the wind. Sometimes, the indirect insults hit her hard. Running back home or to the abandoned part of the town would be her refuge, where she would let it all out; the pain, sorrow, loneliness, all of it. But the one thing she had never felt, was anger, towards anyone; as to why? was still a mystery. To sum up, the odds weren't very good.

And they weren't getting better any time soon.