The Cherry Blossom Tree

Cherry Chapter Eighteen

I stared at my laptop screen, trying not to let my frustration tempt me into throwing the thing out the kitchen window. Though truthfully it was more my lack of money than my self control that kept the expensive piece of technology sitting firmly on the dining room table.

To appease my sour mood, I settled on nudging it forcefully to my right, and then promptly thunked my head down onto the table in its place. The hollow thwack as my head hit did nothing but rattle my brain and make my eyes water from the pain.

Great. Now along with my annoyingly persistent case of writer's block, I could add a minor concussion to my list of things to gripe about.

"What are you doing?"

I didn't look as Annabel came into the room to plant herself across from me. "Contemplating selling my brain on the black market so I can get a new one that works with me, not against me."

"Oh! While you're at it, can you trade in Vivien's elephant-like memory. She really needs to develop some selective amnesia, and fast. I swear the woman remembers everything, down to the one time I ran down the street without a shirt on. I mean, I was seven, and all the boys were doing it. How was I supposed to know it was socially unacceptable."

This brought my head up and I rolled my eyes. "Don't be silly, Bitty Bell. Nobody can pick and choose memories to wipe from someone's mind."

"Right. But they can take your brain out of your head and give you another without killing you. Interesting."

I snapped my mouth open to continue the argument, then realised what it was I was arguing over.

"That's what I thought," she said when I settled on glowering at her.

It was safe to say she'd fallen victim to my foul mood. Not that she cared. On the contrary, she seemed to delight in making me even madder as she flipped my laptop around to face her and tsked in disapproval at what she discovered.

I'd been sitting here staring a hole in my laptop for the better part of three hours. The open document I had up was still blank, the only progress being I'd nearly broken the backspace key from overusing it. Each attempt at coherent literature seemed to be worse than one before it, until I wondered how I'd made it this far in life without being able to write a structurally correct paragraph. How had I won those writing awards at my previous high school?

"I'm very disappointed in you, Kitty Kat," Annabel admonished, swivelling the laptop back around to face me.

"I know," I moaned, clasping my useless head in my hands. "I've been trying all morning, but nothing will come to me. It's like I've gone brain dead."

Annabel frowned at me. "What are you talking about?"

I paused in my mini meltdown to mirror her expression. "Uh, that depends. What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the fact you're using this for anything other than what it was invented for." She tapped the edge of the laptop with one manicured finger. Then huffed at me in exasperation when I wasn't following. "Cyber stalking, sweetie. Specifically, cyber stalking a gloriously tanned, green eyed demi-god. I say demi-god because the only god on earth out there is my future husband."

My cheeks burned at her description. "I'm not going to stalk my boyfriend online!"

"Why not?" she asked, genuinely confused.

"Because I deleted all of my social networking pages when Dad became public enemy number one and we became social pariahs. And because it's not nice to stalk people," I added hastily, realising this should have been my first and only reason.