Acting Royal #Wattys2017

Chapter 42

JENNY

Jenny woke up the next morning in her old bedroom. It was strangely familiar. She had barely slept that night, it was partly because she was thinking about Zayn, partly because the silence out here was so deafening. She was used to inner city sounds, cars, sirens the odd mad person screaming but there was nothing but the sound of the odd cricket and a lonely owl. She forgot how dark it was here too. No city and street lights to illuminate things. Blackness. And silence. Two terrible things when one's head is swimming- nothing to distract those thoughts, in fact, it just made it worse.

She stood up and walked over to her mirror. There were old, childhood stickers stuck to the side of it, that she'd collected from the inside of bubble gum wrapped. She'd thought they were very cool at the time. The glanced at her walls, how fucking embarrassing...

Was that a poster of N'Sync? Or BoyZone, or Backstreet Boys, Boy to men, kids on the block... whatever. It was a poster of four teenager looking guys, with terrible bleached tipped spiky hair with their shirts off. She cringed. She had actually thought that was hot once upon a time? She knew better now though, she quickly pushed him out of her mind. She wanted to try and get through a few minutes without thinking about Zayn if she could. But his face was literally emblazoned on her brain- like a movie projecting an image on a screen. Because every single time she closed her eyes, she saw his face. And every single time she caught herself gazing longingly at that image, she reminded herself of what he had said to her... a fuck. A game. A challenge. No one had ever said anything more cruel to her, ever.

She pulled on an old athletic outfit from school, it was a bit tight, but it's not like she was trying to dress up and impress the sheep. She left her room and went to the kitchen to make coffee. The passage was small and dark and the walls were covered with family photos, she looked around her house and it had never seemed more small and dark as it did right now.

She made herself a cup of coffee and headed out the front door. Her parents were already out working the farm, she had heard them go out at 4 in the morning. But when she got outside and started walking around, she was horrified. The farm was almost non-existent. The draught had savaged the land and the livestock. There were only a few thin looking sheep left and hardly and crops growing at all. She'd had no idea it was this bad. How the hell were her parents even surviving? How were they making money and living? And they were nearly at a retirement age, and here they were working every day.

In the distance she could see her mother and Chris, the only employee left, trying to dip a few of the cows, a job that should be done by many more people than that. She walked over to the old oak tree that she and her friends had climbed when she was younger and looked around. It was so bleak. It looked dead. The sun had scorched the earth and killed everything. Suddenly she thought about that cheque she'd torn up on the runway so hastily, had she known about this, she might not have torn it up so eagerly.

Nothing she could do about that now, she certainly wasn't going to call Rafiq and say, "What's up, give me some money." She couldn't do that now, the only thing she could do was to roll up her own sleeves and help her parents hold onto what was left of their farm.