The Dead Face Girl (part 5)

This is a continuation of an original fiction piece by flickagirl. The first part is found here! You can find all installments by clicking on the tag "dead face girl."

Mother

As I walked home from school that day, I considered stopping by Missus’s house to tell her about Ben, but I decided not to. I was just too tired and confused by the day’s events to do anything else than crash on my bed and listen to my iPod at an absurd volume. Unfortunately, my mother had other plans.

Our house is way out in the middle of nowhere. It’s about fifteen minutes away anything other than trees. My foster mother says that it lets her experience nature at its height, but I know it’s because, since the plows often don’t make it out this far, my mother has an excuse for when she walks into work late. She likes to sleep in.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful walk. And I have to say, it’s a beautiful house, too. It’s painted brown, and has huge windows that look out on the yard. It’s got two stories. The lower level is the basement, but also the main living space. It has windows that are exactly at ground level, so you can see the leaves in the fall and the snow in the winter in incredible detail. It’s very peaceful. On the outside.

On the inside, everything’s perfect. Depending on your definition of perfect. There are pictures on the mantle and little glass thing hung in the windows, but there’s that feeling that you get in a museum, where if you touch anything, you’ll get arrested. And I’m not entirely sure you won’t. My foster mother (her name is Julie) keeps everything exactly in its place. She never moves anything. Ever.

Once, when I had just moved to her house (I was only six), my foster mother had gone to get groceries. I was throwing the only thing I got to keep from my previous life, a little red ball, up in the air and caching it. At one point, the ball hit Julie’s tiny glass jars that were on the mantle. Fortunately, the floor was carpeted, so none of them broke as they fell. I gently picked them up and placed them back on the mantle, hoping that they were in the same place as I had left them. But when Julie came home an hour later, she noticed right away. She dragged me out of my room and started shaking me, demanding I tell her why I had touched her things. Almost at the point of tears I told her. She let me go and went back into my room. After a few minutes, she came out with my little red ball. She told me that she was going to keep it until she was sure I had learned to keep my grubby little fingers off her things.

A week later, when I asked for my ball back, she told me that she had thrown it down the garbage disposal. After that, I locked myself in my bedroom and cried for about three hours. That ball was my whole life at the time. From then on, I hated Julie. I hated her to death. But I never showed it. I never showed anything ever again.

As I stepped into the house, I noticed that something was different. It smelled different. But it was a good different. It smelled like fresh backed chocolate chip cookies.