Where Ivy Grows

1

    Her shivering was constant as she sat by a strange lake. She has no clue where she is but at this moment she does not care. The weather is harsh on her bare skin, the cold wind feels like tiny pin pricks everytime it blows. The only thing her skin is protected by is a long skin tight black dress with spaghetti straps and a long revealing slit in her thigh that she hates. Obviously the dress was not her pick, it was her mothers. She hates wearing black and it always makes her feel sad. She loves expressing herself through fashion, though the color of the dress certainly fits her mood tonight.

Pack your shit and get out of my house.

More tears fell down her cheeks as she recalled the last words her mother said to her before she packed a bag and left the only home she'd ever known.

She had never had a great relationship with her parents and she was the only child so she grew up pretty alone. She didn't have a normal childhood like all the kids in school talked about. She didn't get to hug her parents or tell them she loves them, she didn't get to have the feeling of running to her dad after he had a long day of work and hugging him or have the comfort of being tucked into bed by her parents after they read her a story.

She didn't have a cool uncle or the stereotypical drunk aunt that ruins family dinner. Hell, she never really had a family dinner she was always told to stay in her room until the guests left.

She knows her parents were embarrassed of her and they had a reputation to uphold but she didn't understand their hatred.

She had a lot of trouble speaking growing up. She has always had a stutter and could never really pronounce her r's correctly but she didn't see that as a problem. She went to speech therapy everyday from the age of 3 and her therapist was one of the only people in her life that didn't degrade her speech.

Her parents didn't understand that her stuttering was permanent and they were always trying to fix her in that sense. What she did understand though, was that her stutter got better around people she was comfortable with like her therapist Laura.

Laura was probably the kindest woman she had ever met and overtime her stutter got better and better around her. It lessened to the point where she would only stutter once every sentence and she was very proud of herself.

Her r's were still a sore spot for her though and it probably frustrated her more than her stutter. She hated it. She always felt like a baby when her r's started sounded more like w's and most times it would make her cry.

She always cried when she was angry, another characteristic she hated about herself but Laura told her it was okay and normal and that she just didn't process her emotions like other people did but it didn't make it a bad thing.

Tonight, her mother and father had dinner with a friend they were in business with and of course he brought along his son who was never a nice boy in all the years she had known him. She was glad when her parents told her to stay downstairs and eat dinner with them but what she didn't know was that it wasn't actually an invitation from the kindness of their hearts, it was a business deal.

Her parents told her she was to marry Eric, the son of her parents friend who had come over for dinner. They said all of these things about it being better for the company and it would make both families look better to the media but at that point she was already halfway to her room to start packing her bags.

Her mother had followed her and was yelling a bunch of things to her that she had honestly blocked out, the only sound she had heard was the ringing in her ears and her own thoughts.

My own parents are actually trying to marry me off and get rid of me.

My parents think of me as no more than a business deal.