Chapter 2

When we pulled up to the brand new, huge yellow Victorian-styled house (which sort of reminded me of my Grandma's house), after our 8,000,000,000 trips back and forth between states, I practically jumped out of the car.

"Holy s**t, I have never been so happy to be out of a car in my life." I said as I bolted up the front porch steps. They creaked.

My mother had gotten out of her Honda Civic by this time and she placed her hands softly on her hips, staring at me with one eyebrow raised. "Stella Mae. Watch your language."

Being close to my mother didn't excuse me from receiving the normal punishments for teenagers. I was her only daughter, after all, and she had high standards for me. Those standards certainly did not include having a potty mouth.

After zipping my lips tightly, I flung the stained-glass front door open. It really was a gorgeous house. It was massive, for starters. It had a massive backyard, 3 full bathrooms, 4 bedrooms, a corridor, a parlor, a very large kitchen which looked like it came straight out of a home magazine, and a basement. In short, the house looked like it was from either a horror film or a wealthy family.

I have always been mortified of basements. Every child is completely terrified of something, and my something happened to be basements. The fact that this house looked haunted as f**k to begin with surely didn't help. I never quite understood the fear, but it may have had something to do with when I was younger. My brother used to ask me if I wanted to play hide-and-seek with him, wait for me to hide in the basement, as I always did, and then lock me down there. Don't you dare think he had the decency to leave the light on.

After racing up the large, black, spiral staircase, I arrived in a large hallway with 5 maple doors. They had all been painted black to match the staircase. That project must have occurred quite a while ago because it literally looked like someone had sat at each door and scratched for 5 hours. The baseboards at the bottom of the wall were mutilated. It was every home reconstruction crew's worst nightmare. The walls were painted a dreary gray/blue color, which went exceptionally well with the black, I might add. There were little scratches on the walls everywhere, but they were odd because they weren't low scratches that could have been produced by a pet dog or cat. They were up high. Like.. Almost as high as the top of each of the doors. I don't know if my mom had noticed or not. Probably not, because if she had, she probably would have made a huge deal about it. Making a huge deal about small things was what she was good at.

I headed over to the very first door on the right. The reason why I picked this door is because it was severely scratched up. The others were too, of course, but this one was far worse. I wrapped my hand around the silver knob and twisted. Immediately when I opened the door, I got the smell of some sort of florally perfume shoved up my nose. It's not that it didn't smell good, it's that 1. That was really odd, considering it had been over 20 years since someone lived in here, and 2. Too much of one smell is unpleasant, and it smelled like someone had blown up a flower bomb in that moment.

I had decided that this was the room I wanted. It was a fairly large room, and the walls were painted a really cute lilac color. To compliment the light purple walls, the baseboards were a cream color, with little black and purple flower designs on them. How unique. The purple used for the flowers on the baseboards was identical to the purple which had been used to paint the walls long ago.

It had a very large walk-in closet. And I was later to find out that it was the only room with a closet bigger than 2 feet wide. I guess back when this house was built, people really didn't have that many things, so they didn't need nearly as much room as people do today. What a shame that nowadays no one has enough until they have too much.