Muse’s Supermassive Black hole was blasting from my car stereo as I pulled into the school’s parking lot. I got out of my baby and patted the hood as I closed the door. By ‘my baby’ I mean my black mustang, the first car I’ve ever owned and paid for with my own money (well  partly anyway; I’d pay back the loan I took from my Mom eventually). He’s old but reliable and hasn’t let me down yet.

School was a drag, but my goal was to become an arts journalist just like my Dad. Don’t get me wrong, I think education is the greatest asset a person can have, but I just hate all the rules and restrictions of the institute of school, the stereotypes and the judging of everyone, by everyone. 

When my Daddy was still alive he was a revered journalist of film and theatre and he travelled all over the world to watch countless numbers of shows. Sometimes our whole family went together when Mom had international conferences to attend as well, but my favourite memory was when the three of us went to New York and I saw my first Broadway Musical, Annie. Mom still says to this day that I was so thrilled by the performance that I was the only 4 year old that wasn’t fast asleep by the curtain close. He instilled an appreciation in me of the fine arts and often called me “Shirley Temple” with a big cheesy grin on his face, because I had inherited his love of singing, dancing and performing.  My dad was my favourite person in the whole world and he always told me to follow my dreams, giving me every opportunity possible whether it be classical singing or ballet lessons; he supported and believed in me.

So when he died in a plane crash coming home from a Shakespeare theatre festival in London, my whole world fell apart. My heart now had a huge piece of it missing.

My Mom was devastated and sank into a small bout of depression, shutting everyone out. And even though I know that it wasn’t her fault, the 10 year old little girl I was felt crushed being pushed away from the one parent she had left, especially when she needed her most. During those 2 years of depression, the little girl had to grow up fast and learn to look after herself while her Mom was in a depression clinic half the time.

I’d been so angry and confused, I’d yelled at my mom and blamed her for dad’s death, telling her that if she booked the earlier flight like dad wanted her to, then he wouldn’t be dead right now and we’d still be a family.

That is my biggest regret, because I can still see the tears streaming down her eyes as she says “Ava I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” I wish it never happened because I was 10 and naïve, I didn’t understand and I had hurt my Mom, putting a barrier between us.

But when she got better, she wasn’t the Mom I knew that sang in the shower or made waffles with ice cream for breakfast anymore. She became rigid and engrossed in her work at the hospital, taking more shifts than ever and leaving me on my own.  I resented her for that.

As a doctor, mom made enough income to keep us more than comfortable and I was still allowed singing and dancing lessons. But in the summer of my 13th birthday when I told her my dream to become a Broadway actress just like the ones in the shows dad reviewed, my Mom snapped at me and yelled “Absolutely not! I will not have my daughter trying to get into such an inconsistent and unpredictable industry!” “You will give up that ridiculous idea and that is an ORDER!”

Suddenly I didn’t feel like the good girl anymore. Being obedient and suppressing my feelings and dreams only made me hate my life. And little by little, I made the change.

Ballet was out the window and I gave all of my dresses, tiaras and tutus away to my younger cousins. Classical singing? Not for me (Though my teachers had begged me to stay).

But hold on a sec, before you start getting the wrong idea that I was just going to give up doing what I loved because I felt sorry for myself, you’re wrong.

Instead of ballet, I became fascinated by Hip-hop and contemporary dance and Classical singing lessons became RnB and soul. This kind of music and dance opened up a new world of new ways to express myself: ballet didn't have moves that I could convey anger through, classical singing didn’t let me bare all of the emotions I felt through my voice. 

I swapped tiaras, pink tutus and ballet shoes for dark sunglasses, studded leather jackets and high-heeled boots.  And maybe it’s the sentimental ‘Shirley Temple’ in me, but I just couldn’t bear to throw away my pointe shoes. I still love ballet and appreciate the art of the dance, but it’s in the past for me, locked away like my shoes in a dark corner of my closet.

It’s since been 8 years and I’ve moved on. I still miss my Dad and I’ll always love him, but I’ve grown up to be a different person now. I’ve never had heaps of friends because of my tendency to speak my mind; weird how in the democracy of the United States of America people look at me like my head’s on backwards when all I’m doing is practicing my legal right to freedom of speech on their plastic faces and disgusting size G breast implants that should be illegal. But I do have a group of really good ones, quirky I’ll admit, but loyal and unwavering. I met them all in high school though, so they’ve only ever seen bad Ava. Rose has known me since we were 3; she knows the person I used to be and everything I went through, yet miraculously she’s stuck with me through thick and thin and been a steadfast friend even when I began to change drastically.

“Hey Ave-y! Whatcha been up to girl?” comes a cheerful voice with a slight Southern twang to it on my left as I’m joined by Kim who links her arm with mine.

“Hey Kimmy!!” I say in an annoying high-pitched voice to imitate her greeting, “Stop calling me Ave-y, Kim! You know it drives me crazy!”

“Aww I’m just messin’ with ya, cutie.” She replies, patting my arm.

Kim’s the first friend I made in high school. It was in the first week when I’d been more antagonistic than ever and when Rose had been kidnapped by “The Bumblebees”. You know how every school has that control-freak popular clique, like The Plastics in Mean Girls, well for some retarded reason our school mascot is a bumblebee and I guess that these girls couldn’t come up with a more original name. Anyway Rose had literally been kidnapped by the Bumble bees because they were trying to recruit new members or something and she was just the model they were apparently looking for. Rose escaped, thank God. And I don’t really know what happened but they made some sort of deal that Rose could sit with us but had to participate in all their Bumblebee events and activities.

I was left to eat lunch in the cafeteria by myself, not that I minded too much because I had plenty of space to put my feet up and at the time I was new to the thrill of having people being intimidated by me. It was fun to be bad. But evidently not everyone was affected because all of a sudden a cheerful girl with caramel-brown skin and tousled ebony curls and a colourful outfit plonked her lunch tray onto the table exclaiming “Man that queue was long, I am hungrier than a woodpecker with a headache!” I stared at her in shock while she glanced up and said “Hey don’t be looking at my mac and cheese that way, it ain’t going in your stomach.”

“Oh I’m so sorry if I offended your pasta” I mumbled rolling my eyes and thinking that this girl was a real weirdo.

She burst out laughing “AHAHAHAHA! That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard since my grand-daddy pretended to have a heart-attack on April Fools!”

Weird. Weird. Weird. My eyebrows scrunched together in confusion, trying to process this girl’s unorthodox personality.

“Naww look at your scrunched up face ya cutie, I just wanna pinch that cheek meat O’ yours.”

“What did you just call me?” I asked in disbelief, I would NOT describe myself as cute or sweet at all.

“What?” she replied momentarily puzzled, “Oh! I called you cutie, ya cutie!”

“I am NOT cute, I’m trouble and you should stay away if you know what’s good for you!” I retaliated. In hindsight I must’ve sounded like such a try-hard ugh.

She just laughed and said “I’m Kimberly, and I already know that you’re Ava. People been buzzin’ bout you like flies round a dead horse on a hot summer’s day, since you walked through these doors!

Hesitantly taking her outstretched hand in a handshake, she continued “I figured I’d mess with you a bit n see if you were a real bitch or just someone who didn’t care bout what others thought. Thankfully you’re the latter and I like you; you’re a real good person I can just tell.”

“You don’t know anything about me!” I retorted. She smile gently and looked right at me, “trust me sweet-cheeks, I have a knack for these kinds of things. It’s in ma creole blood! My great-gram-grams was a Voodoo witch from the Louisiana Bayou!”

I was really taken aback about how non-judgmental and how willing to accept others Kim was. I can tell you now that since freshmen year we’ve been really close friends. Kim’s basically mastered masking her Southern accent (though it comes right back when she’s angry) and I got exponentially better at being hard and no-nonsense and keeping my image that way. I’d rather be thought of as bad for doing what I want to do and being who I want to be, than be seen desperately trying to conform with the crowd doing things that others tell me to do and being what someone else tells me to be.

Making our way through the morning rush hour in the hallway we catch Alyssa and Luke on their way to their first period class. Alyssa tries to call out to us but gets swept away by the crowd. Instead, Luke who is on the basketball team and whose perfectly styled brown-haired head remains above the sea of people calls out “We’ll see you at lunch!”

Luke’s the only guy in our little mix-matched group.  You’d think there’d be more but there’s been more than one instance when guys have pretended to be nice and friendly, but then turned around and been a little bitch to my friends behind their backs; it turns out they were all trying to get with me. But as the Spice girls once said, “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.” You have to earn my trust.

There’s no danger of that with Luke though because he and Alyssa are one of those fairy tale-ish sweetheart couples that had commitment rings and remembered every birthday and anniversary and randomly gave each other presents all the time. But not in that sappy I-want-to-vomit kind of way, they just really had a strong bond. I sometimes wish that someone would look at me the way Luke looks at Alyssa; with love, admiration and a flicker of desire.

Alyssa is in the same hip hop dance crew as me. She’s an amazing dancer thanks to her Latina heritage, and when I first started she was the one to show me the ropes. Having already been trained as a ballet dancer to be flexible and limber, I caught on quick and pretty soon we were dancing in sync, move for move, and beat for beat. She keeps telling me I should join the cheer squad with her because she could use a real friend in amongst those Bumblebee wanna’bees’ and followers.  But I refused to have anything to do with them or their prissy little Queen Bee, Melissa Proud. I’m not one to judge a person if they haven’t done anything wrong, but while Melissa seems innocent and perfect, there’s always something fishy going on around her that I can’t quite put my finger on…

Anyway it’s always been the 5 of us: Me, Rose, Kim, Alyssa and Luke.

And as for dating, apart from Alyssa and Luke (the cuties), Kim’s got a long distance relationship going on between her and her boyfriend Raleigh who lives in Louisiana. They met when she was visiting her relatives there last summer. I’ve never met the guy but Kim’s a great judge of character and if she likes him, then I approve.

And then there’s my Disney princess best friend who is in a perpetual state of “someday my Prince will come.” There have been countless guys lining up to date her but she’s stubbornly waiting for Darcy to come back and sweep her off her feet. You see when we were 6, Rose’s next door neighbours had a son 2 years older than us called Darcy and they were inseparable. He was her Prince Charming and she was his Princess. I mean that both figuratively and literally because we actually played ‘Princes and princesses’ all the time; He was obviously the prince and Rose loved being Sleeping beauty because she adored the idea of a prince coming to find her and break the spell with true love’s kiss. I liked being Cinderella because she went out to find her Prince the first time, she didn’t just waste time and wait around for him to come, and in the end they found each other again.  Anyway Darcy moved away to New York when we turned 7 promising Rose that he’d come back to her, but it’s been 11 years and we haven’t heard a peep from him. I once told Rose to stop waiting for him because realistically he probably wasn’t ever coming back, and she didn’t talk to me for 3 days. I haven’t said anything like that since, but she can’t keep waiting forever. I just don’t want to see her get hurt.

As for me, I’m not the long-term relationship kind of girl or the dating type at all. My love life was casual hook-ups that never lasted more than a few weeks. The kind of guys that were bold enough to try and get with me all knew that I wasn’t in it for the long run, because neither were they.

I was convinced that I’d never actually fall in love or that anyone in their right mind would truly love a bad girl forever. Bad girls were the fun you had before you settled down with a good girl and forgot all about them.

Note the past tense; was. I didn’t know it then, but my entire life was about to change by being paired together by fate with a certain delicious goody-two shoes…

Ryan Haywood.

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Hope you enjoyed it! :)
Cerise xx