Harriet Westwicke

This is a short piece that I want to make longer.

Harriet Westwicke had always been a quiet girl who loved to draw, which is why everyone was surprised when she killed her friend.

Ever since elementary school, it had been Harriet’s passion to sketch everything in the room with her instead of doing her work"which is why all of her teachers called her a “problem child.” Harriet’s parents, doing what any self-respecting parent would do, sent her away to a boarding school in hopes that they would discipline the unruliness out of her. It’s impossible to say what her life would have been like had she stayed in Portland, Oregon, but it is possible to say that Mary-Anne would be alive today.

It was October 1983 when a sixteen year-old Harriet began her move to her new home in Glendale, California. The day itself was just any other Oregon day: cloudy with a chance of clear skies (but realistically not likely) and the grass, which practically glowed, was regulation by Neighborhood Association standards.

But the weather and grass were not what Harriet would miss. Not only were her parents destroying her current life (which, realistically, was limited in excitement), they were also giving away her drawing pads and special pencils. Perhaps it was for the best, but when Harriet saw her old home finally disappear from view, she was left feeling empty in the backseat of her parent’s Chrysler Imperial.

The car ride was basically a straight-shot when they got onto I-5 (a straight-shot that took seventeen hours), so it wasn’t too hard for Harriet to sleep. The alternative was talking to her parents the whole time, which usually ended with her dad asking why she didn’t hang out with more boys and her mom “defending” with ‘she just isn’t that sort of pretty.’ She was always tempted to bring up that she was a split of their DNA, but the fight didn’t seem worth it without an escape, so sleeping it was.

“…iet…ar…riet…dear…Harriet, dear,” The grogginess of sleep began to fade as light flooded into Harriet’s mind. Her mother was still insistently shaking her knee, “We’ve arrived!” It was hard to share her enthusiasm while operating a half-started brain, but she attempted an animated smile"which reminded her of trying to smile after a trip to the dentist and a little Novocain.

She looked out the window; her left eyelid still glued shut by sleep. The world outside was very different from what Harriet had grown up around. For starters, this place looked to be almost half the size of Portland, which to Harriet meant that there was considerably less to draw, not that that was her parent’s concern in the first place. They probably would have picked somewhere smaller had there been safer choices, Glendale was a fairly safe place after all (her parents wanted her disciplined, not raped).

The school was their first stop, mostly because Harriet’s mother wanted her to get acquainted with the campus before dropping her off in the middle of nowhere. Hoover High “School for the Gifted” was more like a penitentiary than an educational facility. There was only one building, half for the dormitories and half for classrooms. The two wings were symmetrical, distinguishable as two only because of the large tower between them (which went up twenty feet to the roof and another fifteen to the spire).

In the amount of time it took to walk across its lawn, Harriet counted thirty-four windows in the front and seven chimneys. And of course, her first thought was to draw it.