Lacey
She half listened to the conversation around her, head down, her long red hair covering her green eyes as she tried to stay as invisible as possible.
"Isn't it sad these days that teenagers are so disrespectful and rude" her stepmother Agnes was commenting as her friend whose name Lacey couldn't remember murmured her agreement.
She took a quiet bite of her muffin, and wondered if it would be impolite to excuse herself and head up to her room.
It was with relief that Agnes wished her friend a farewell, Lacey automatically beginning to clean up the afternoon tea dishes and sweeping up the crumbs.
"May I please be excused Stepmother" Lacey requested quietly as Agnes looked over the mess with a critical eye.
"I guess so" she snapped, the pleasant and friendly demeanour completely gone. The mask she presented when there was company slipping off easily as her vindictive and irritable nature returned.
Lacey didn't hesitate, heading upstairs and sitting at her desk, desperate to finish her application. Agnes and her father Johnathon had no idea that she was trying to apply for a scholarship to an elite academy and she wasn't going to tell them unless she was accepted. Part of her thought that it wasn't going to happen even as she forced herself to sit and finish it before the deadline.
Success. She gave a rare smile as she finished the required essay and submitted, receiving confirmation in her email. Now it was just a matter of waiting and checking the mailbox everyday until she received the letter that either granted her the scholarship or turned her down. Until she knew either way it wouldn't hurt to dream would it? Besides she would be heading back to school in a matter of weeks and wanted to find a possible job in the meantime to help with school costs. Her stepmother and father wouldn't contribute anything that she was almost certain of. She needed a job that would off her hours after school and on weekends. Although the scholarship covered the school fees and uniforms as well as basic equipment, she would need to pay for any further uniforms and necessities throughout the year..
It was her final year and the elite academy she was applying for had the best music program in the country. It was her dream to be able to sing and get into college and pursue her dream. Lacey wanted to be a songwriter as well as sing and produce music. For as long as she could remember this had been a dream of hers and now that she was older and more determined to make it happen, she was going after it with all the avenues she could use.
To be honest it wasn't just the music program that would benefit her but the dormitories that housed students who wanted to stay there instead of commuting back and forth. Lacey needed a place to study, sleep and get away from her stepmother and father. Agnes was a spiteful and hateful person who had almost no time for Lacey unless it was to order her around or criticize her and her father was just uninterested in spending time with his only daughter at all. Being a minister of the town's local church, he spent hours organising paperwork and his Sunday sermon, forcing Lacey to attend in order to present the image of a loving family. If the townspeople only knew.
She glanced at the photograph of her mother with a nostalgic smile. Her mother had been everything to Lacey. Lacey had inherited her long straight red hair and bright green eyes from her as well as her love of music. Her childhood was full of beautiful memories of both of them singing together, her mother teaching her the piano and the love that she constantly gave to Lacey. They were bittersweet and Lacey clung to those memories in her saddest times.
Her father had been nicer and more loving back then. When her mother died in a car crash when Lacey was only fifteen,, he became withdrawn, angry and constantly drinking while pretending to still be a pious Christian man. Lacey had done her best to be there for him, even as she mourned the loss of her mother Jenny as well. She had feared her father would go completely off the deep end when a year after the tragedy, her father met Agnes and married her four months after the fact. That had cut deeper than anything else. That her father had moved on so quickly and forgotten his wife in his haste to marry, Agnes showing contempt for Lacey from their very first meeting.
Lacey sighed. She was turning eighteen and all she wanted was to succeed in school and be able to take care of herself instead of wishing things were different. She gathered up the copies of resumes she had typed and printed out, dressing in black trousers and white blouse before heading downstairs. She would go to town and start looking for open jobs, handing out resumes and trying her luck. The coffee shop would be her first destination then the small grocery stores, clothing stores and so on. She would also keep her eyes peeled for signs in windows advertising for a person. It beat being at home anyway.
She half expected to run into Agnes, cringing at having to explain what she was doing, but her stepmother had left, her car clearly gone in the driveway. She could have jumped for joy. Instead she hurriedly grabbed her purse and coat, locking the door behind her as she began to walk to the town centre, careful to look down at her feet and dodge rocks and loose gravel on the footpath and roads. The last thing Lacey needed was to trip or fall or even worse be hit by a car because she wasn't looking properly.
