The Neighbours

Chapter Three: Mustard Yellow or Fushia

We woke up this morning to Madison's phone ringing. It was her mom, basically saying that if Madison didn't come home soon to unpack her stuff and chose paints for her room, she would chose them herself and she would pick mustard yellow.

So me and Maddie hightailed out of my house, jumped the fence seperated our yards, and ran into the De La Garza household to save Maddie's room.

"I would say Lavender, but your rooms that colour."

Nodding my head in agreement, I stretched out on the floor of Maddie's room, yawning. We were surrounded by boxes, bags and many, many, paint swatches.

"Go with like, blue then."

"But like, everybody on the face of the earth's room is blue."

"Okay, so if you wanna be unique, go with like fushia."

"What the hell is fushia?" She asked squinting her eyes.

"I don't know, a redy-pink?"

"My room is not going to be 'fushia'!"

"Okay, okay calm down de la garza, jeez. Why don't you do white?"

Maddie paused for a moment, thinking. "That could be kinda cool, then I could draw random stuff on the walls in black! That'd be cool!"

She grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me downstairs to where Dianna was sitting.

"Mom I decided on a colour!"

"We'll go to the store, wait till I finish my coffee. Avalon, do you know any paint stores around here?"

"Um, yeah, that's a Benjamin Moore kinda close. It's like a 7 minuet drive."

"Great." She said, grabbing her purse off the counter.

We piled in the car and pulled down the driveway. Both me and Maddie were on our phones in the backseat, so it was pretty quite.

"The traffic here is amazing!" Dianna gushed, looking out the window.

"Yeah, the outskirts of Toronto are pretty quite. The city's busy though."

We got the paint quickly, I mean it's not like we spent a lot of time choosing which shade of white.

As soon as we got back to Maddie's house, we set up towels on the floor to make sure that we didn't spill any paint on to her hardwood floor. Dianna wanted to hire a professional painter, but Maddie insisted on painting it herself.

We were about half way done the second coat, and it was looking pretty good, when my phone rang for the second time today.

Careful to not get paint on my phone, I checked the caller ID.

Dad.

Great.

"Hello?" I answered nervously. The last time my dad called me, he was dead drunk.

"Babygirl?" He slurred. I could hardly hear his voice over the noise of what I'm assuming is a club. Which is sad, because it's 1 o'clock in the afternoon.

Did he seriously go to a club before 5? Or is he still the from the night before? It's hard to tell these days.

"What do you want?"

He tried to respond, but all I got was noise and a whole lot of static before I lost connection.

Sighing, I put my phone in my back pocket, trying to forget about my father. A club or bar is always where my dad disappears to. I can't even remember the last time I saw my dad. I think it was last Monday.

It's a Saturday.

"You okay?" Maddie said, stepping down a step-ladder.

"Yeah, whatever it doesn't matter." I smiled grimly and picked up my paint brush. "Let's just get back to work."

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I wrote this chapter in like 20 mins because I just realized that I hadn't updated in a month and I felt really bad. So im sorry that this chapter is shit and all over the place, but I really just wanted to get something up.

I'll try to be better at updating.