Running from hell isnʼt easy. Especially when thereʼs someone dragging you back down into it.
Belligerent, brash and always in shades of black, Freya is hardly a lady. Hidden away by her father, sheʼs lived a normal life despite being born into the...
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I GROAN, TURNING IN MY SHEETS as someone opens the window in my room, sending bright sunlight pouring in. It’s Ana, and she’s strolling around my room in a cornflower yellow sports bra and shorts.
She wakes up in the early hours of the morning to workout, gets bored, then walks into my room to annoy me. I should really just lock my door, but I’m so tired every night that I forget.
I’m about to wrap the cover over my head when Ana completely rips the duvet from me.
“Fuck, Ana, stop!”
“No!” She throws her arms in the air. “Your room’s a mess. You’re a mess. It’s almost one and you haven’t woken up yet.”
She’s not wrong. My room is a mess. There are clothes strewn everywhere. Mama forbids the maids from picking them up because the black from my clothes always bleeds into the other laundry, so I have to do my laundry myself.
I groan again, a pounding headache at my temple. “I think I might have some sort of acute depression.”
“You know what I think?” Ana lifts a brow. “I think you need to get up and brush your teeth and have a shower.”
A cool breeze hits my bare legs and I look over to see my windows fully open. I give her a deeply irritated look. “Did you really have to open the windows?”
“Your room’s so dark,” she counters, perching herself on my mahogany couch. “I have to open it if I want to see anything in here.”
Since I moved out for college straight after high school and spent little time at home during vacations, my room is preserved mostly as it was during high school. I was clearly a bit too comfortable with picking up a rolling brush, because all my walls are a shade of black, and covered in rock band posters. It looks like darker replica of Kat Stratford’s room.
“I like it dark,” I say. “I can’t sleep if my room isn’t completely dark.”
I turn, burying my face into my pillow since my sister won’t let me wallow in peace.
“You know,” she says, “I ordered Thai . . .”
And just like that, I’m fumbling across the bed. “I’m up. I’m up.”
We have cooks, but every now and then, we order takeout. To be honest, I’m the one who got Ana hooked to Thai food. Now she’s dangling it in front of me as an incentive to get out of my bed and clean my room. Classic.
When I walk back into my room freshly showered, Ana’s already done cleaning up a small portion of my room. I slip on an oversized AC/DC tee shirt that falls to my knees, and droplets of water fall to the ground from the tips of my hair as I manoeuvre my way through piles of clothes towards her.
Winding my hair in a towel, I dump all the food wrappers in the bin and pick up all the hair ties I thought I lost, shoving them back into the box laying on my vanity table. We glance around my room, and now that it’s less of a mess, it doesn’t look so bad.
