Could Life be Any Worse?

CHAPTER ONE
  MOM AND I1

I can predict what’s going to happen today. The same as yesterday, as the day before that. Life is boring. I’m normal, organized Katie Merced and there’s nothing I can do about it.
But tomorrow something’s happening. My parents don’t know. Neither my brother. I’m going to run away. Away to somewhere wild, where things CAN’T be organized. Where things CAN’T be all tidied up and locked together like a fastidious old lady’s manor.
Well anyway, this is how the story began;2

I was looking in the mirror on an increasingly boring Wednesday. It was 6:32, two minutes after my alarm went off, and I was brushing my hair. I did this every morning, brush hair, put on boring clothes, eat boring breakfast, then go to school on the boring old bus.
I went downstairs sporting a beige tank top and fake khaki jeans. My faded white sneakers did nothing to spruce up the outfit. Even my pale copper hair in a loose bun on the top of my head added no interest.
My mother smiled at me as I sat down to eat. “What is it, Ma?” I asked in a flat tone, almost as if I were a fog horn proclaiming the danger of rocks nearby.
“Katie, it’s Weetabix, like we have every morning.” My mother said this in a cool voice, as if she said these words every morning, which she did.
“Just checking, Ma, you know I wish…” I trailed of hoping for my mother to ask me what I wished, just for a change of scene. Her green eyes looked eerily like the inside of a cucumber, all cold and wet. She was looking different this morning, not me.
“Hmmmm.” My mother flashed her teeth at me than said, “Katie, what do you wish?”
“I wish that we could be a normal family!” I blurted this out, my eyes filling with tears. “Can’t we just be a stupid normal family, OKAY?”
My mother turned on me, and I felt as if I had made ripples in an otherwise magically smooth pond. “Katie, I can’t believe you. You have no IDEA how HARD I have worked to keep this family NORMAL! We do the same things every day, I only by you and your brother NORMAL clothes! What more could you WANT!” Her cucumber eyes had more wetness to them, and now they looked more like ginkgo leaves in the rain.
“But mom, that’s not what normal is.” I had said this so quietly, and meekly, that for a moment I thought my mom hadn’t heard me.
But she was looking at me, shaking her head. Her auburn hair swung in the patch of sunlight next to her head. Her pale skin looked even paler in the sunlight, as did her light pink summer dress.
She opened her mouth to say something, a glimmer of love in her cool green eyes, when my fifteen year old brother Michael came charging down the stairs, coat in hand blabbering something about being late.
At the bottom step, he halted and looked a bit confused. “I… I thought I heard yelling… Everything all right?”
My mother and I nodded in uniform, as if we had been trained and expecting this all along. My brother smiled weakly and mumbled, “Ooookay, well I’m off, Tata!”
And he waltzed out the door.
In my head I could hear thoughts echoing.
What would happen next?
Could life be any worse?3

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2BCONTINUED5

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