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MOST PEOPLE WOULD HAVE A LIE IN on the first day of Summer, staying in a soundless, peaceful sleep whilst their parents went off to work and left them be by themselves. Some kids would already be on a plane flying to sunny California, Greece or Hawaii with their families, ready to soak up the endless sun and return to Derry looking brown and bronzed.
For Amanda Bowers, it was quite the opposite. She was woken by her own alarm clock at 6 in the morning, the blaring alarm making her groan as she reached her hand out to flip the switch and turn it off. So much for a lazy summer. At least if the alarm clock wouldn't have woken her up, the sun shining in from outside her window would've.
Amanda had no curtains, a slight invasion of privacy, but she didn't mind. She changed in her bathroom and didn't have to worry about being shouted at to open her curtains in the morning. They used to be there, but then Amanda had been dancing around her room, fell and accidentally ripped the material down.
Like it happened only yesterday, the memory circled around her mind. The loud rip of the cloth, the thud of her fall and the material on her face. It had taken a moment for her to collect herself before she stood and took the curtains off of her...then her father had come into the room. Ever since then, music was banned from the house.
Amanda always thought that the curtain incident was when she realised Henry didn't like her enough to protect her, but she knew deep down that he hadn't really cared since their mother died. She remembered seeing him stood in the doorway as her fathers hands came down on her, then he walked away as though he wasn't a victim to their fathers anger.
When Amanda thought of things like that, she reckoned that she could kill Henry. For leaving her to deal with that, for doing that to her himself...but then she remembered her mother and how such a pure angel was beaten to death practically every day to protect her children. Amanda would do the same, even if she hated Henry. That's what separated them.
Amanda cared. At the end of the day he was still her brother and she loved him, even if he was an extreme asshole who she wanted to strangle half the time.
The pounding on her bedroom door only made her statement more true.
"I'm coming!" She called, flipping the covers off of her and climbing out of bed. One of her three shirts was what she slept in, that and some underwear, so she had to shimmy some denim shorts up her legs before she stepped out.
Opening the door she saw Henry stalking back to his room, that was the breakfast knock. Sometimes Amanda felt like Cinderella before the ball, a servant for her family, made to cook and clean for them. That's exactly what she was but Amanda wasn't exactly expecting a fairy godmother to approach her and make her wear a big blue dress and send her to the ball.
Instead she was still stuck cooking basic scrambled eggs for her father who would eat before work and her brother who would eat, hog the TV and then go out with his creepy friends who would arrive at exactly 7:30 every morning. Going out to terrorise kids. Amanda had no idea why they came or woke up so early.
