author's note, july 2019: it's been a long long time since i wrote this in 2013 so put that into perspective aha
plot can be triggering and is also literally written by a 12 year old who had no concept of Life and Love etc so pls take that into account this really does not reflect what i'm like today and is also probably incredibly unrealistic and somewhat romanticised
this covers issues such as depression, self harm and suicide - so if these are triggering i wouldn't read this, and of course if you think you're struggling with any of these things then please please talk to someone about it x
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"Levi! Lexi! It's time to wake up!" my mum called from downstairs.
My sleepy eyes fluttered open, used to this wake up call. I stretched whilst still lying down, and ignoring my mother's call, I flung my duvet back over my head. There was a knocking from the other side of the wall. It was surprising how clear the two slow knocks and three fast knocks were through the thin walls between mine and my brother's room.
"Morning, Levi," I greeted quietly, yawning.
"Morning, Lexi," he said back to me through the walls in a lazy voice, and when I refused to reply, we both took that as a sign that we were going to ignore our mum and sleep.
Levi and Lexi Lewis. The twins that everyone cooed over. When we were babies and toddlers, they would always call us darlings, cuties, sweethearts. Our blonde hair and blue eyes matched perfectly. We used to wear matching outfits. We were like two peas in a pod. We shared secrets, we had this little twin language of our own. We wouldn't go anywhere without each other.
As we grew older, we stopped sticking together the whole time. We had our own friends, we would make our own decisions and do what we personally enjoyed. For me, that was art, but for him, it was what every teenage boy liked - sports and video games. The barrier between boys and girls grew, and when we turned eleven, we dumped the bedroom we had been sharing and got next-door rooms by ourselves. I couldn't exactly share a room with him, could I? We gradually separated. We were no longer the one person we seemed to be together. Neither of us wanted it, but it just happened. We had become social teenagers who cared about different things, hung out with other children, had mood swings and were always stressing out.
However, nothing was really different - we were still close. If I was upset, he was the first one there for me. We had grown up home-schooled and besides the other children in our village, we only really had each other. It was the countryside. We were living in isolation compared to city children, and maybe we had various different friends, but we would always be best friends. We still had our twin language, we still knew each other's secrets. Even after puberty came to invade our body, we still had matching hair and eyes. He'd grown into a hot guy who everyone he met was crushing on, while I was that ditzy girl who spent ages in the bathroom in the morning. So nothing was really that different. I still loved my brother the same.
"Levi! Lexi!" my mother's shrill voice ringed up the stairs. "Even if it's the last week of school, it doesn't mean you can lie in until goodness knows what hours!"
Mine and Levi's reply was silence. I put a pillow on top of my head and pretended to be asleep, and I knew Levi was doing the same. It was a sort of ritual. Mum would call, Levi and I would warn each other to shut up so we would have more sleep and less school time, and then we would both pretend we weren't awake.
I heard my mum's feet stomp up the stairs angrily. I braced myself for the screaming that was going to come by wrapping the pillow around my head. True, this didn't exactly look like I was asleep, but I didn't want to go deaf. My mother could shout.
"Lexi Renee Lewis, wake up right this instant!" my mum shouted, entering my bedroom with a slammed door behind her. I tried to go back to sleep, but her screams of how lazy my brother and I were, would wake up the best sleeper in the world.
"Come-on-wake-up!" Mum said stiffly, tearing my pillow away from my head and talking into my ear. So much for not going deaf. "Can you ever get drummed into your head that home-school is no different to normal school! You should be grateful you're not waking up at six in the morning!"
As we lived in a village, basically the only primary school we could have gone to was the local school, which was "beneath my mum's expectations". I think she liked it so much that she carried on into secondary school, which was expected, since the nearest secondary school was a half-hour bus journey's away. I wouldn't have minded going to mainstream school either - the way that my mum taught maths was sleep-inducing, even when we were little.
"Alexis! Just get up now! And wake your brother up!"
"Mum, that's not even my name," I grunted, forgetting to pretend to be asleep. When I introduced myself to someone, they always asked if my name was Alexis. I hated that name. I was just plain Lexi. It was nothing against people called Alexis, it was just really irritating that people thought that was my name. Unfortunately, my mum had figured out my pet peeve.
"It's a name that will wake you up any day," Mum smirked, secretly proud of herself. I loved my mum, but she acted so immature sometimes. She was also very clever, as she'd managed to wake me up. "Downstairs in ten minutes! Wake your brother up as well!"
"You go do it," I sighed sleepily.
"He's your twin brother!" my mum replied, starting to walk out.
"Levi's your son!" I shouted back.
"Just do it, ok, sweetheart?" Mum said sweetly, trying to persuade me to wake up Levi. I could barely wake up myself, never mind another person. Plus I was probably the world's greatest sleeper - normally children would try and stay up as late as possible or willingly wake up for something they were excited for, but I was just the kind of teenager who spent as much time as possible being a sleepy sloth.
"No!" I complained, burying myself under my blankets for the thousandth time. My mother walked back in and tried to pull the blankets out of my hands, but I was too strong for her. "It's either just me, or none of us! I'm not waking him up!"
Levi was an equally good sleeper as me. He went for a heavy sleep though, while I went for quantity of sleep. It was nearly impossible for me to wake him up. It also took way too much effort to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if he was already genuinely asleep and dreaming after two minutes.
"Please, Lexi-kins?" Mum lisped, still trying to convince me by treating me like a baby.
"Mum, please may you exit this area until called for," I said formally, trying to move my mother's weight off my body, seeing as she was literally sitting on me.
"Lexi, you know how you're the only one who can wake him up," my mum responded. That was true - the time my mum tried to wake Levi up, I think he accidentally slapped her with the pillow and knocked her off the bed.
"I feel honoured that you're arguing over me." Levi suddenly appeared in my doorway, arms crossed over his bare chest. How come he got the good looks of the twins? Not like I had a crush on him, otherwise that would be incest, but still. It was unfair. I had an abundance of spots on my forehead and the weirdest shaped head. "You two are like little kids."
Also, I was wrong about him being asleep.
I grinned at my twin's sarcasm, and shook my mum off my bed. I gave my family the 'sleepy glare' which normally meant for them to get out of my bedroom. Once they had departed my bedroom, I opened my wardrobe. A few t-shirts and skirts fell out as the doors slid to one side.
I groaned, picking up the clothing, wiping the dust off them and throwing them back into the clothes-filled wardrobe. Once upon a time, I had a neat, sorted-out wardrobe with different sections for different clothing. But at this time, my wardrobe was basically random garments thrown on top of each other in a heap. I loved clothes, but I seemed to treat them like scum.
Throwing clothes behind me onto the ground, I finally found a t-shirt that looked decent, and a pair of denim shorts. After getting dressed, I ran barefoot down the stairs. I couldn't wait for school to be over - it was mid-July and the summer holidays started in a few days. Unlike normal school, we didn't have fun races and ice-cream picnics in the last few days of term. Instead, we carried on working. Typical. I didn't know why everyone wanted to be home-schooled because if your typical home-schooling was anything like the way my mother taught me and Levi, they would pick the local comprehensive any day.
While I waited for Levi to start and finish making the pancakes for breakfast (we had a breakfast rota, and it was his turn that day) I slid into the seat in front of the laptop and looked at the screen. It was already logged onto my mum's account, and a few tabs in Google Chrome were still open. She must have been using it early that morning, and forgotten to log off.
Not being bothered to log off onto my own account, I clicked on the internet, opened a new tab and typed an address into the box to check my email. It loaded quite quickly for me to see I had no emails. Not that I was expecting any emails, seeing as the few people I knew neglected their emails and used text messaging. I had a phone, but unlike everyone else, I preferred checking my email. My phone was a Nokia brick, and was pretty useless. At least our laptop was okay and it didn't take me ten centuries to type out one sentence.
"Lexi, what do you want on your pancakes?" Levi's deep voice called.
"Nutella," I said. He should have known that, because I was a Nutella addict, but he just got into the habit of asking me. After a grunt of approval from Levi, I turned back to the laptop. I opened another tab and went to deviantART.
I was a striving artist. It was my best subject in school, and in my spare time I was pretty much always doing art. Whether it was digital art, painting, photography or sketching, any art was amazing to me. I wanted to be some sort of artist when I grew up. It was one of the only things I was good at, and I didn't want to waste my talent. I was aiming to go to art college. That was my first step into my art career.
So that's why I joined deviantART. A place to put my art on. There were some bad things about it, like the fact that I was hopelessly addicted to it, but the pros massively outweighed the cons.
Drumming my fingers against the table while deviantART loaded slowly due to our useless Internet, I looked at what my mum had been on. I couldn't help being nosy, but it was a fun thing to do whilst waiting, seeing as I could find out about my mum's hidden social life. She had a few tabs saved on Google Chrome - her g-mail (looked like she was going out to dinner with her friends Clare and Vikki), Wikipedia (open at the Beatles - she was obsessed with them) and a few other business websites. Nothing really interesting, until I saw the last tab. It was on Google Search, and the phrase she had typed in nearly made me faint with shock.
"secondary schools near wolverhampton"
A few results were highlighted in purple, implying they had been clicked on. I didn't want to believe what I thought it meant. Wolverhampton was the nearest city to where we lived.
Levi and I were going to a proper secondary school for the first time in our lives.
My jaw dropped, and as my mum walked past towards the garden, I had to remember to close my mouth. We were going to a school?
We were actually going to a mainstream school next year? Was my mum mad?
I always saw this day coming, but I never thought it would actually happen this soon.
Trying to forget about what I had just read in that tab, I heard Levi shout for me to eat my pancakes before they turned cold. Switching the tabs quickly and banging the lid of the laptop down on itself, I ran to the breakfast table.
Levi cursed as he tried to slide the pancakes from the pan onto the plates, one of them slipping off onto the table and landing on the Nutella.
I never saw that. I never read anything.
"What's wrong, Lex?" my brother asked suspiciously as I chewed my pancakes absent-mindedly. Jolting myself back to real life, I found myself right in front of Levi.
"Nothing," I smiled, trying to look convincing. "Don't worry."
***
That tip-off was all I had to stop me from leaving home. If I hadn't had the warning, I would be going on a rampage right now. At least I already knew what was coming.
I didn't want to go to a school. I just wouldn't be able to do it. Even though I hated home-school, I was so used to it that I wanted to do it forever. School was out of the question for me. It would just be too much of a change. I just wanted to sleep in till nine and paint all day.
"No, Mum!" I screamed, stamping my foot. "I'm not going to a school!"
"You have GCSEs next year, you deserve some proper education!" I got my firey temper from my mother - her face was bright red and she was banging her fist on the table.
"I don't want to go! Why can't you carry on teaching us!" I bellowed.
"I can't teach you ungrateful children forever!"
Levi, who was sitting next to me, rolled his eyes, completely unfazed by the argument. He was too calm and collected to get into the fight.
"I can't believe you, Mum! I don't want to go! Just one more year?"
"You're going to school, and that's final!"
"No!"
"Yes, Alexis!"
"That's not my effing name!"
"Don't you dare swear at me!"
"That's not even a swear word!"
"Does it look like I care? Up to your room right this instant!"
"Fine, but don't expect me to come out ever again! I don't want to see your face again! I'm not going!" I stomped out of the door, slamming it behind me and ran up to my bedroom. Grabbing shop-bought textbooks, I threw them into my wall, and they fell back down, even more bent from my anger.
"I don't mind going to school, Mum." I could hear Levi's calm voice downstairs.
Urgh! I thought. My annoyingly calm brother!
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Edited chapter 4/7/2014
New story! :D I know it starts off quite slow, but give it a chance? Please? XD
Thanks for reading and voting/commenting/following! :)