Author's Notes: Hi, everyone, this is my new story, (not actually very new since I started it like two years ago), and I really hope you guys will read, love, vote and comment on it. It's in the Watty Awards. I know I should be working on my other story but I have severe writer's block on it right now, a few more pages are already done but I personally don't think they make much sense, so I'm not uploading. Hopefully, I'll get through soon enough.
About this story: It is set in my home country, Nigeria (so, it is written in British English mostly and there will probably be a lot of slangs that'll be easy to understand, though). This is not a racist story; it's just the story of every other girl with dreams and hopes in an unfavourable environment. I hope you enjoy. It is teen fiction though i can't really promise much in the protagonist romance department. This prologue part is long and was supposed to be in italics but I changed my mind to allow for easy reading. It was actually somehow boring to write but subsequent chapters won't be so boring, it was a necessary chapter to provide the kind of background I wanted.
Sorry that this A/N is so long, there's just a lot I need to say, and I'm kinda nervous about this story.
Editors and suggestions are really welcome.
Please don't forget to vote, comment, and support. Thanks a lot.
Enjoy Reading!
Xx annie93 xX
Catharsis: Broken Dreams
Prologue
Theresa Nelson walked into her daughter's room that beautiful Monday morning, and got ready to do something she would hate herself for, forever.
It seemed to her that her daughter, Bevin, was keeping secrets.
Recently, Theresa and her husband, David, noted that their first daughter's room was always under lock and key; and then, Theresa walked into the room one day to find Bevin writing something in a notebook. That wasn't odd, but the fact that she quickly put the book out of sight was.
So, the night before, Theresa got a hold of one of Bevin's duplicate keys, and decided to start an investigation into what was wrong with her daughter.
And she had to do it fast.
Theresa let herself in, moved quickly to her daughter's wardrobe, and started sifting through her untidily arranged clothes. She was so absorbed in trying to find out if Bevin was hanging out with the wrong crowd or going around with boys, or getting influenced in a bad way, that she didn't remember to inwardly berate her daughter for being so untidy.
Her innocent, sweet, trusting, meek girl was changing. The smiles that came often while growing up seemed kind of forced now. There were very frequent mood swings that couldn't entirely be blamed on PMS; the first fruits of rebellion were also starting to show. Couldn't get enough of TV this minute, tired of it the next. The studying continued and so did writing in the little notebook.
Theresa was sure the little book wasn't part of her daughter's school books because small notebooks and books not published by the school were not accepted at the Secondary School her children attended. The urgency gripped her again; she had to find the notebook now.
Theresa turned Bevin's wardrobe upside down, literally (Bevin wouldn't really notice the difference), but still didn't find anything. The whole room was almost equal to a big mess, and that made searching the whole room a tiring business. Theresa sat down at the foot of her daughter's unmade bed and asked herself where she would have hidden something so important. She wracked her brain for several long seconds before it finally clicked. She had to search the obvious places.
Theresa stood with a renewed sense of purpose and checked every obvious place she could think of, like the floor, the bed, an abandoned school bag, etc. Five minutes later, she was standing with her hands on her hips, empty-handed. It was all getting real boring to her.
She was almost giving up when she noticed the most obvious place to keep a book in the room: the reading table. She almost screamed 'yay!' out of happiness but restrained herself.
Theresa moved through the book pile until she got to the seventh book. The book looked peculiar and kind of scary with so many warnings on the cover page to warn any straying fingers and eyes off reading it.
Suddenly, it all felt wrong to Theresa. She started thinking to herself, "You can't just steal your daughter's bedroom keys, then sneak into the room and make yourself comfortable in her private life. If anyone finds out about this, they'll think you are demented."
The next second, she convinced herself by saying, "I'm just a concerned parent." She arranged the other books but held on to the important one she wanted. Somehow, she knew it was an S.S. 3 student's idea of a diary, a kind of improvising if you didn't have the real thing.
"How would you feel if someone opened your diary?" a voice in her head asked.
"I don't even own a diary," she replied herself, "I'm just a concerned mother."
The first voice would not be silenced, "So, who cares? If she wanted you to be concerned, she would have involved you. But she didn't." The voice gloated.
"Yes, and it hurts. I just want to know what's wrong and see if I can fix it." She excused.
"Oh really, Master Fixer, or in your case, Mistress." the voice mocked again but Theresa knew she had won this time.
When did internal voices become so smart?
Motherly instincts and mutual respect conflicted within Theresa. She really wanted to know what was wrong but also, if Bevin didn't tell her, she probably didn't want her to know. Or probably, it wasn't even a diary but a surprise, like an invention or a discovery.
Yeah, right.
"Oh, no. I can't do this. I really can't."
Theresa moved to replace the book, but clumsy as she was (clumsiness being probably the only thing Bevin got from her), she caught her foot on a mysterious object. She almost fell but caught herself in time. The book wasn't so lucky. It fell to the floor and dropped open to a page. Theresa bent to retrieve it and close it, but her eyes caught the first few lines before she could stop herself. She couldn't resist it; she had to take a sneak peek.
Scrawled in the neat, prints of her daughter's near-perfect handwriting were very demoralizing and confusing words.
"Nights, I hate Nights
And, I hate Mornings, too."
She felt as if the earth had gone still and every beat of her heart sounded very loud in her ears.
Where had she gone wrong? She started to ask God, but decided this was something she had to answer on her own. How could her daughter hate the most beautiful phenomena in a day? Sunrises and Sunsets. What did she like then, Afternoons?
Theresa sat at the table, closing her eyes and the book as well. She held her head n her hands, if something wasn't wrong before, it definitely was now.
Or why else would a 14+ year old girl living in this country even think about opening a journal?
Theresa gave herself a mental slap, mooning over the situation isn't going to change anything. The first step was identifying the problem; and she was going to do that right at that moment. She was going to read the whole journal.
Theresa gathered herself together and opened the book. She steeled herself against the mental impact as she read the first words.
At that moment, she became perfectly aware of and unnerved by the fact that her meek, sweet, trusting, innocent little girl was gone forever. And a person she didn't even know or recognise had taken her place.
She could only hope it wasn't too late.
