Passing the Maths exam was definitely the highlight of my week because from that point until Friday evening, it was like a downhill spiral. Don't get me wrong, things weren't that bad, but they certainly weren't great either. In fact, they were far from great. Icy, if we're going to bring Christmas adjectives into this thing. I know what you're thinking, how can something go from being so upbeat and positive and turn into a nightmare within a matter of days? Well, it's quite simple and here are a few simple reasons as to why.

1) The Halloween drawing contest.

2) The Halloween Disco dress code.  

3) The Disco.

Three things that might seem complicated on the outside, but are a whole lot more complex once you're involved in the situations themselves. If you haven't already noticed, there is a theme running through all of them. That theme? Halloween. I had never, not once in my life celebrated nor had anything to do with Halloween, yet there I was. Fifteen and questioning my life choices. Seriously, I didn't know if Halloween was worth all the trouble everyone suggested it was.

So, let's start with our first problem, the Halloween drawing contest. We had been given a week to draw something that was Halloween themed, or in my case, a combination between Halloween and Christmas, great in theory, awful in practice. The idea had been an icy street, the aftermath of Jack Frost attack, or something similar. The eerie emptiness of the street and the bitterness that came with the ice was what added to the Halloween ambience I was going for. Only it wasn't exactly working in the way I wanted it to.

The drawing was there, the empty streets, the icy hanging from the buildings, only it wasn't scary. It was, to put it mildly, lame. There were no elements of fear, no elements of Halloween in the slightest. It was just a street with ice on it. Nothing scary about that. It needed a little something, I knew what that something was, but if anyone found out, I was going to pay for risking everything of a drawing.

Magic was the only thing I could think of that might've allowed me to finish the piece in the way that I wanted it to. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Granny had forbidden me from using Magic unless it was some sort of emergency and I'm pretty sure that an art class contest wasn't considered an emergency, at least to any normal person. However, I was not normal in any sense of the word. So, I decided to add a little something extra to my work, it wasn't cheating, not if anyone found out anyway.

Two days before the art was due in, I had shut myself up in my room in order to finish it, Granny and Grandpa knew that I hated to disturbed when working so they knew better than to even enter my room. So, no one was going to catch me out when it came to some minor cheating. Only, I didn't make it that far. The second I attempted to cheat, my annoying inner voice, yelled at me. Like literally yelled at me to stop. I've never had my inner voice yell at me before, but it was weird and a little frightening. Imagine the little cricket from Pinocchio screaming at you, not good.

I've never been one to listen to my inner voice, if I did I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been in half as much trouble as I have been. Safe to say I never listened to the voice, so why on the North Pole's iciest ponds, did I decide that that was the perfect time to have a moral compass?

Truthfully, I don't think I can answer that question. What I do know is that I didn't use Magic in the end. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Using Magic to win a contest was different to using Magic to do Maths homework, or clean up my room. I suppose, in a way, it was worse. Granny told me that when it came to living in the normal world, Magic was not to be used unless it was necessary, completely necessary. This was not. In that moment, I knew I was doing it for myself rather than for any other reason, and that's not how Magic should be used.

So, rather than do it the quick way and solve all my problems with a simple swipe of my hand, I opted for the long, complicated version. Which meant digging out my glitter, which I had an abundance of, and spending several hours using two small paintbrushes to glue the glitter to my drawn picture.

The next several hours were spent with glue, glitter and a large amount of patience. I went over the white chalk outline with light blue and white glitter, correcting any mistakes with a cotton bud. By the end, the snow shone in the light and it added an eerie feel to the entire piece. The white chalk on the black for the street, the glitter for the snow and the emptiness of the piece created the feeling I was going for.

Though the insane amount of glitter that covered my desk and me wasn't really helping me to feel particularly Halloween-ee.

"Kenzie! Dinner's ready! Get down here before your Grandpa eats it all!" Granny yelled from the bottom of the stairs. Judging by the rushed tone, I knew I had to be down there soon or he really would eat my food, something he had done before.

"Coming!" I called back, brushing my hands off in an attempt to remove some of the glitter that had accumulated. I didn't have time to wash my hands or remove the glitter, so I left my room leaving a trail of glitter all over the floor, even more so as I made my way down the stairs.

Entering the kitchen, a waterfall of glitter fell from my body and it left the floor sparkling under the kitchen lights, the tiles shining in a thousand different colours. Had it been part of the design, I am sure it would have been wonderful, but it wasn't so it was an inconvenience. Especially if you're wearing black socks, the two do not go together particularly well.

"You look like an explosion went off at a glitter factory," Grandpa said as I took my seat at the dining room table.

"Thanks for that, art is often dirty work," I replied, taking a sip of my drink and swallowing a mouthful of glitter simultaneously. Yeah, not the tastiest thing in the universe.

"Didn't know it was that sparkly, but each to their own I suppose," Grandpa shrugged, putting a forkful of pasta in his mouth. Somehow that pasta had glitter on it. I was all the way at the other side of the table, yet there we go. Glitter, the bane of everyone's existence. "Ugh, that was more glitter than pasta."

"Warning, glitter will now be on everything you touch and eat over the next few days," I said, taking a bite of my dinner and ignoring the glitter it was coated in.

And so for the next few days, we ate a scarce amount of food and a whole lot of glitter, if I were to cut my finger, all someone would see is glitter. Just glitter everywhere. Now, that doesn't make my list of top three things that were bothering me, mainly because it was just a mild inconvenience and not something more, like the other things. The contest bothered me because I went a moral dilemma and went for the right choice, a rare decision. The other two, well we'll get to that in a moment. I suppose, this only made the list out of pure spite, because I was annoyed at myself for making a decision that was morally acceptable. I was not a moral person, in any sense of the word.

Moving on to number two on my list of annoying events, the dress code for the Halloween disco. Now, I knew this disco was a thing, people had been talking about it since the day I arrived. What I didn't know was that in order to get in, you needed a costume. I found that exciting fact out the Tuesday before the disco, three days before the disco. I did not have a costume, nor any idea I actually wanted to be for my first ever Halloween. Can you see why it's on my list of things that made my week worst? If I had found out about it sooner, it wouldn't have been much of an issue, but I didn't, so it was.

It was third lesson English with Niska and Joel that the costume element of the disco was finally brought up, by Niska. "So, Joel, Halloween disco on Friday, who or what are you dressing up as?" she asked.

"As morbid as this sounds, I'm goin' for Fred Weasley, after the Battle of Hogwarts," Joel said, a grin spreading across his face. It looked seriously creepy and and I have to admit, concerned me more than Nick on sugar.

"Do we're going to match, I'm going as Bellatrix, well Bellatrix with braces anyway," Niska replied with a shrug of her shoulders, then she turned to me. "What about you Kenz?"

"I didn't know we had to dress up, so nothing. Bit too late to come up with anything now," I shrugged, doodling on the top of my page. None of us were doing any of the work set in the lesson, though we should've been, but to be fair, no one was doing the work.

"Come on, I'm sure you can come up with something, it doesn't have to be too dramatic anyway. If you have a blue dress you could go as El-"

"Don't even say it. I am not going to the disco dressed as Elsa, no way," I replied, interrupting Niska.

In the few weeks I had been at Ashbury, I had been compared to Elsa almost fifty-thousand times. It was a nightmare. Little Year Sevens waddling up to me and pointing it out, random six-year-olds on the street pointing me out their parents. Yeah, not fun. The amount of times I've been tempted to dye my hair a stupid colour because of the comments is an insane number, more than I can count. Seriously, my hair may have been the same as Elsa's, but I didn't have Ice powers. Well, not that they knew of any way.

"Oh, come on, Ken! Just let it go!" Niska joked, I responded by slapping her on the arm, rather hard if I do say so myself.

"No. I'll see what I can come up with, but I am not going as Elsa," I said, confirming my stance on the entire thing.

Elsa might've been the easiest, but I wasn't going to fall into that trap. It was almost expected of me to turn up in a long blue dress with my hair in a French plait singing Let It Go at the top of my voice. There was no way I was doing that. One, I can't sing, two, I just couldn't be bothered, it was the obvious choice, the easiest, but where's the fun in that? Why go as something people expected when I could go as something completely different and surprise everyone? Besides, I was sick of people calling me Elsa.

So, rather than focus on any of lessons throughout the remainder of the day, I focused on coming up with a costume idea that could be made quickly and easily. Due to my limited time scale of three to four days, the only ones I could up with were the lame ones. Like a Zombie school girl, or a mummy, that kind of stuff. I didn't plan on being generic, but generic was where my mind was going, I just couldn't think of anything that could work.

Until I went back to my art project. The premise for the art project had been a Jack Frost rampage, an event that left everything covered in a thin layer of ice. The idea of being powerful, but almost unknown in a sense. More people know about Elsa then they do about Jack Frost, but both have the capability to freeze an entire city if they felt like that. Elsa has the catchy songs, the cute story, but she's fictional, she's part of a film. Jack Frost is real, a real threat that no one know about.

But what if he wasn't unknown?

What if there was a way to be a Magic Ice Queen, but it be a twist on a classic story many think is a myth? And then, I knew who I was going as to the disco. Putting my art project to the side, I began to rummage around my wardrobe, looking for something I could use as a basis for my costume. It wasn't as hard as many would think, considering most, if not all of my wardrobe contained winter-themed clothing. That and it was pretty easy to create a female Jack Frost costume

Hidden at the back of my wardrobe, I found the dress I was looking for and pulled it out, briefly scanning my eyes over it to make sure it didn't have any holes or any other issues. Luckily for me, it was clean. With the dress in hand, I went back to my desk and pulled out a spare bit of paper and a pencil. With the outline of the dress in mind, I began to sketch the dress and any extra pieces that could be added. It was a long shot, but I was hoping Granny could add the extra pieces for me. I sucked with a sewing machine, she did not, so my fingers were crossed tightly.

With the sketch and the dress in hand, I made my way across the hall to Granny's sewing room, where she was fixing one of Grandpa's old jumpers. I knocked on the door and waited for the reply that allowed me to enter the room. "Come in," Granny said.

"I need your assistance," I said, pushing the door open.

"What did you break?" Granny asked, not looking up from the jumper.

"Wow, you have so little faith in me. I didn't break anything, I do need your masterful sewing skills, though."

"With what?"

"There is a Halloween disco on Friday night and until today I didn't know it was supposed to fancy dress. Basically, I need some small adjustments made to this old dress of mine by Friday night."

"Let's have a look," Granny said, putting Grandpa's jumper down on her work table. I handed over the sketch and let the dress hang over my arm whilst she examined the sketch and the labels I had added to prompt her with the final outcome.

"You're asking a lot in a few days, Ken, but I'm sure with a little help I can get this done. Who are you supposed to be anyway?"

"That is a secret. Oh, and is it okay if Joel and Niska come over after school so we can get ready and maybe stay the night?" I added.

"If their parents are fine with it, sure, you can camp out in the living room."

"Great!"

And it was settled. Granny was going to add the extra's to the dress and the sleepover was in motion, after a quick text to Niska and Joel that was. I had also managed to get hold of my Aunt Ivy, a make-up artist living in London, to see if she was going to make it over to help out with the ridiculous costume idea I had planned for the night. I sucked at doing make-up, so with Ivy on board I would be able to look how I wanted to and, hopefully everything would go according to plan.

Of course, I wouldn't know if it was going to work until the night of the disco, but with my art project complete and Granny make haste with my costume design, everything was looking up. Well, I thought it was anyway. But, the list says otherwise. The disco would not have made it onto the list were it not for a disastrous event that was sure to occur when we got to the disco itself.

The disco was certainly going to be a new chapter in my life, a new adventure I had yet to discover, and although retrospectively it wasn't fantastic, at the time I was thoroughly excited. Why is excitement usually short lived? 

~~~

A/N - Shorter chapter this time around, but we are getting to the disco and I am so excited to write it because, if you haven't already guessed, something big is going to go down! The question is, what is it?

I want to know your thoughts on the events of the disco and what you think is going to happen that ruins Kenzie's mood! Comment your thoughts down below!

Don't forget to vote to show some love and add Last Christmas to your reading list so you never miss an update from me! We've got a lot of juicy stuff to come and I would hate for you to miss it!

Dedication - This chapter is dedicated to Monkey289 who comment on every chapter and make me smile with all of their comments! Thank you :)

First Published - July 16th, 2017