The Greenhill Experiment

Chapter One

The window was flung wide open, dust particles dancing in the fading-fast, late August light which filled the room. The elderly neighbour had just cut the grass, the fresh scent wafting over the fence and up to the second floor and now the silence in the absence of the lawnmower was both a comfort and a curse, left more space to think without the need to focus on blocking out the obnoxious vibrating sound.

Alyssa stared back at the slightly unsettling figure of herself in the mirror which was also caked in dust. She couldn't decide if the grey substance on the wood and glass was new from the disturbance in her bedroom that day, or old, unnoticed until she was too stressed to do anything but zone out and consider something as simple as dust.

She attempted to plait her dark hair, praying that it would become miraculously less frizzy or even somewhat more manageable in the next few hours and wondered how on earth she was going to make it through the next few days of change without running back home, forming a duvet burrito in her bedroom and never leaving, almost considered cancelling everything planned to ponder dust particles and inhale the scent of freshly-cut grass forever.

The last week before the move had drawn to a firm and abrupt close. Alyssa was supposed to have spent the past few days organising her life into boxes, but had instead procrastinated the task, hoping that if she avoided her responsibilities she would avoid the emotions that she had always been led to believe would come with moving, but now that she was packing, panic had swallowed any room for sentimentality and having left everything to the last minute, she had been too busy, too nervous and far too distracted to contemplate any form of nostalgia until this very moment.

The idea of going back to Greenhill the next day for the first time in over a decade was too surreal, hadn't quite sunk in. In the fogginess of her mind, her birth place was quiet, peaceful and above all, as the name suggested, green, but part of her knew that it would seem like a different place entirely when she saw it again, considered that maybe the greens had become greys and that the quiet had become less of a hush and more of a rush. It was a place she often involuntarily visited in her dreams, some of them memories she couldn't be sure were real and others which she remembered like it was only yesterday and now it wasn't the reflectiveness of saying goodbye which worried her, it was the uncertainty of the hello which waited.

The shocking slam of the front door broke her contemplation.

"Alyssa?"

"Up here!"

Kimmi bounced up the stairs and into the room, throwing herself on the unmade bed without taking her trainers off. Her blonde curls were bigger than life and she was glowing in a way that could only mean she'd been with her boyfriend Charlie. "Hello, best friend," she chimed in a sing-songy, larger than life tone. "How are we today?"

"Good."

"Good?"

"Good."

"Not fantastic? Not brilliant? Not super-duper fucking excited?" Kimmi exclaimed, waving her hands about enthusiastically above her head. Her eyelashes were thick with mascara as always, her eyeliner flicked into a perfect point.

Alyssa shrugged. "Not really. I'm overthinking it all too much. Driving myself a little crazy."

"Jesus fuck, you're still packing?" the blonde retorted in shock, sitting up, swinging her long legs over the bed frame and changing the subject quickly. "Didn't you start weeks ago?"

"Well, I said I'd start weeks ago but didn't really start until this morning."

"Oh, that is just typical you," she muttered back teasingly. "Freaked yourself out by being over organised and now you're panic packing anyway."