My Name is Raquel [Editing From Scratch]

Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

-It's a quarter past 6, and the memories of how Zayn and I first met can't seem to fade away. I recall him teaching me how to laugh, cry, and feel pain. Back then I used to call it a weird feeling, whether it was love or pain or heart breaks. I never called the heart by its name. I referred to it as a muscle that just pumps blood; I never had the chance to talk about it. My first Rolling Stones concert was an unforgettable night, and sometimes, I do believe that my mother was half right with her superstitions.

One of them rings my bells: 'if you go without praying or cleansing yourself, a messenger from the demon will haunt you down and make you fall off the right path.'

Some of it was right, but the only wrong matter she said was that if I ever fell off their path, I would make my own right path - a path where my dreams were created, built, and crushed. 

Starting fresh, every time I felt like losing hope. The way Zayn stored a life, helped me find myself, and made me feel captivated as I took a new step closer to my path, yet farther from the Krouse's path, was fascinating. 

I dearly believe that he had an effect on the way my life turned out to be. I do know so now, and I knew it then.

    Carefully, I lay my two photographs from The Rolling Stones' concert on my cherry wooden nightstand - next to an antique lampadaire that was given to Penelope, my mother, by her great grandmother when she threw her quinceanera. 

I remember her saying that after that day she despised everything around her. 'It was my first day when I had hated the color pink, as much as I used to love it after that quinceanera disgusted me and flipped my guts inside out,' she said. When I come to think about it, I actually loved the fact my mother lived a little of her age with her parents approval of becoming whoever she wanted to be.

Finally, I am finished with my first album and jumped into the next book, opening it to the first page: a yellow paper, with little trims on the sides of it, falls onto the ground, I bend down to grab it, and notice its date.

-September the first 2003, Monday.

'It was the beginning of getting-ready-to-school. School starts a week from today, and I'm yet again to-be life's prisoner. I thought life was supposed to be free. I thought it was supposed to be a place where you make your own decisions, and write your own destiny, but my mother always disagreed as if she meant to say: 'sit back and let God wave his magic wand and bloom a cherry tree in our backyard.'

I remember that day very well.

"It's for you," mother snapped as she handed me the land line phone.

"Who is it, mother?" I asked her, still in my silk night gown.

"Whom else, dear?"

Obviously, it was Greg because it was still 9 in the morning and Mandy never woke up that early.

"Hi, Greg," I shrugged.

"No, it's Mandy." She groaned from the other line as I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion. Mandy was up early. Not her usual.

"Oh! Hi, Mand, what is going on?"

"Nothing's wrong psycho. Can you come over in an hour? Greg said he has plans of meeting his friends and he wants us to go along. I don't know he seemed like he begged me to get you into coming along." 

That was odd, but I wasn't bothered to say no, I really wanted to go out of the house before my mother would throw her chores of the day on my shoulders. She didn't know about the trip to Amsterdam, she thought I was sleeping over at Silva Brander's house for the night.