Rainy Days ~Chapter One~

The first chapter of a book I'm writing. Hope you like it~

Chapter One
    The house was a soft green color, with white windows and pale black shutters. The roof was white wood, paint worn from what I could guess was the rain. The gutters and pipes were silver metal, but resolved into a red orange rust. The door was small and charcoal black and the white wood porch had a nice swing that I could imagine myself rocking back and fourth on during the long summer days that were to come. I fell in love with it the moment we rolled up the driveway.
    “Here we are.” Mom said, more to herself then us, as she parked the car behind the moving van and stepped outside, shielding her eyes with one of her hands and placing the other promptly on her hip. “What do you think?”
    Alice put an elbow up on the rolled down window and commented, “It’s green.”
    I rolled my eyes and stepped out, for once agreeing with my mother and replying, “Best house on the street.” Alice stuck her tongue out at me.
    I heard the gravel crunch underneath my sneakers as I ran up the walkway and stood on the porch steps. I grabbed my house key from the pocket of my shorts and opened the door, stepping in.
    The sound of the little portable radio that one of the movers had echoed throughout the empty house from an unknown destination. I took off my sneakers and placed them next to the front door feeling like I had already moved in. My house was the only one I had ever been to where I had to take off my shoes.
    In my mismatched socks, I stumbled up the newly cleaned stairway, sliding my hand along the banister as I ran. I slid down the huge upstairs hallway to the end, where a small white door had a sticky note on it that said “Nova’s room”. Nova. That was me. This was my room, the real thing, the moment of truth.
    I creaked open the door slowly and peered in, then saw the beauty of it all. It was a light white-red color and had curtains with cherry blossoms on them that hung in the white window. The window was on the far right of the room, overlooking the driveway. I could see all the way across the street, four houses to the right, and four houses to the left. It was a fairly large room, completely empty. I knew this would be the one time my room would be empty, and pretty soon all of my old furniture would fill up the bare space. It was a box shape, with a low ceiling and from it hung a paper lantern left from the previous owners. It was the same pale black that the shutters were.
    In the corner of the room was a couch in front of the window, sun pouring over it and draining out the color. I sat down on it and observed it, feeling the heat on my back from the summer light. It was that same black color, this color I was beginning to love. I leaned back and closed my eyes to drown out the blinding sun, and found it easy to imagine myself day after day in that corner, reading. Or at least, that’s what I had expected my summer to include.
    I jumped from my carpet to the wood floor in the hallway from which I came. At the end of the hall was the bathroom, and I slid in my socks as I had coming from the other direction to the door. I stopped myself, and opened the door. It was crystal clear, the way my mother always liked her house to be. I swear, I could even see my reflection in the white tiled floor. Everything was set up and alined in perfect sync, not a thing out of place. The cups for toothbrushes were perfectly set up on the counter, parallel to the soap bar and on the tip of the faucet. I reached over and moved the soap slightly to the left, just to make it seem more like a home than a house. Or, I later considered, to drive my mother crazy when she went from room to room inspecting each of them.
    I closed the door behind me and saw across the hall was Alice’s room. Even the couple of feet there was between me and her bedroom door, I was able to slide across. I opened her door and examined it, untouched. She was probably still sulking in the car, I concluded, and stepped into the hideous purple carpet. The walls were clean white, with purple flowers the same color as the carpet. It looked alright, for Alice’s room. In the old house she had bright pink walls plastered with posters of rock stars, celebrities, kittens, anything cute or that fit her definition of “poster worthy”. I absolutely hated her room, and more for my sake then hers, stayed out of it at all costs.
    There was a linen closet between my room and Alice’s, and an identical one on the other side of the hall that had a vacuum cleaner with soaps and sprays in it.
    Down the hall and on the other side was my mother’s room, with white walls and a high ceiling. Her room, unlike mine and Alice’s, was already filled with furniture and decorations. Everything was new, I noticed. Every single thing in this room was brand new, unfamiliar to me. The red leather couch by the window, the wood bed with a white comforter, the red and white antique looking rug, everything was new. I couldn’t see one thing old, and by the looks of it, there wouldn’t be anything from our old house in my mother’s room.
    When my mother and I had been packing up the house, and all of her belongings, I had experienced an interesting moment. I remember Alice was out with a friend, usual Alice behavior, and my mother had asked me to help her with some old pictures, kodaks and those in frames.
    “What about this one?” I had asked, holding up the picture of the house we had been sitting in, a painting my father had made my mother when they had first moved to the house. I loved this painting, with my father’s small scrawled signature in the bottom right corner of the canvas. It was his identity. And he drew my window like it was the best window of the house.
    She had looked up, and stared into the picture. Her stare was hard, and I avoided getting it as often as I could. It looked as if she were looking through the paint, the canvas, through the frame even. Then, she shook her head and looked up at me, then chuckled. “Of course,” She took it from my hands, “we’ll just... throw this one in the trash.” And she threw it in the garbage can. None of the other pictures had been thrown away, except this one. I had always wondered why.
    I snapped out of my thoughts and closed the door behind me as I left to see the rest of the house. I wondered where Alice was, probably making friends already. That’s what I could expect from Alice, Miss Popular. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she already had a boyfriend in Quince.
    I couldn’t help but wonder what remained in the rest of the house. So I went down the stairs on the other side of the second floor and saw to my left the kitchen and to the right the living room. The kitchen was huge, and it struck a tinge of sadness inside me to think that my father wouldn’t be seen cooking at it like he would have back in Sacramento. My father had been the best chef I’d ever met, and every Saturday would wake us up with whatever dish he felt like preparing. Whatever it was, I would always eat it without hesitation and fill up my stomach to last until next weekend.
    I erased these memories from my mind as I turned towards the living room and saw Clover already resting soundly near the huge window facing the backyard. His brown ears flicked back and fourth as his fat stomach rose up and down slowly.
    Around the corner of the living room was a dining room. It had the best color blue on its walls and a nice big window overlooking the front yard and the house across the street. I would have my fourteenth birthday party in this room in just a few months, and the sea of grass would be darkened out by the pitch black sky. I wondered; could my father have painted such an interesting house? With all its differing colors and floors, and what an empty house it was. My father had loved to paint things that were full and alive. This house was so empty, you could hear a pin drop and echo.
    I had ventured out to every corner of the house and seen enough to know it like the back of my hand, as I was fast at picking up details and remembering things. My mother had set up a small and pathetic lawn chair on the porch where she was sipping her iced tea, her sunglasses zoning her electric green eyes out of sight. I put my sneakers back on and walked outside to join her.
    She looked up at me and tilted her shades. “Can I join you?” I asked her, like a four year old. I felt so small at that moment, I just wanted to shrivel up and go back inside. But I didn’t, I stayed and stood straight up, the way my mother liked me to.
    She looked surprised and replied, “Sure.”
    I didn’t touch the porch swing, didn’t know if the owners hadn’t taken it away yet or if it were our own. Instead, I opted to sit smack dab in the middle of the steps leading up to the porch. Those steps had white paint that had chipped over the years I could imagine were filled with children running up and down them, jumping on them, scraping their knees on them, learning to tie their shoes on them. I leaned back, resting my elbows on the wooden porch, and wondered what would happen to me on these steps.
    I was an observant kid, even at thirteen years old my mind was as curious as that of a five year old. I looked from the grassy lawn to my clothes, a T shirt with the Orange Crush logo and green cargo shorts that reached my knees, with my old and worn out brown converse sneakers; black ankle socks. My mother had wanted so much for me to turn out like Alice, to be able to experience raising a ribbon-wearing teenage girl all over again. She had compromised at letting me keep my midnight black hair at chin length, even though that was still too short for her to accept.
    No wonder she had always liked Alice so much, she had always had enough long black hair to put up in a pony tail, or hang down to the small of her back. She also had my mother’s green eyes, while I shared the eyes my father had which were big and a murky green-brown color. The eyes of my sister and mother were the only things I had ever envied about them.
    “You start school in a few weeks.” My mother told me without looking down, taking a sip of her iced tea. She said this as if she thought I needed a reminder. As I knew, it was easy to remember the good things, but also hard to forget things no one wanted to remember.
    I drooped my head down onto my knees and stared out at the blazing sun. “Yeah, I know.” I replied.
    “Nova,” she turned her head and looked at me, although I couldn’t really tell where her eyes were set behind her enormous sunglasses. “Do you think you’ll go out for cheerleading this year?” There was a glimmer of hope in her voice, which made it all the more sweet of a victory when I told her no.
    She sighed and put one elbow up on her armrest, propping her head in her hand like she was posing for a picture. “I wish you would.”
    “I know.”
    “You might really like it.” My mother pointed out. “Alice loved cheerleading.”
    I turned around, shrugged and kicked a few pebbles in front of my foot on the steps. “I dunno.” I told her, not really caring. “I don’t think I would.”
    I wasn’t facing her, but I could swear my mother had that look on her face. The look of half disappointment, half anger. Alice was always telling me I was just out to get my mother, like I had something strongly against her. I don’t remember that I did... I don’t think that was true necessarily. My mother was perfectly fine. I guess I had just wished she understood me, Nova, as a person more. To her, I was just a miniature Alice with a couple of problems. Of course, being the person she was, she could easily fix them, or so she thought. But really, were those problems? My father had never believed so, I had never believed so. Those “problems” were always just me.
    “But didn’t you always love going to see Alice?” She asked. As if I had had a choice. I rolled my eyes. More like my mother always dragged me along unless my father had saved me and already planned something. In which case, she’d normally drag both of us along to wait for the halftime shows with the marching band and the cheerleading routines.
    I shook my head, honest. “No.” I said simply, turning my head over my shoulder and looking at her with as innocent a look as I could manage. It didn’t work, and my mother tilted down her sunglasses. Before she could meet her eyes with mine and give me the stare of death, I turned back around and dodged it. Her stare of death was probably enough to even get me to try cheerleading just to get it to stop.
    “Oh God.” She sighed. At first I thought it was about me, and my refusal to be my sister’s clone. But then I heard the crunching of street gravel and looked up. Rolling along the driveway drove a black, dented BMW. We both knew, and dreaded, who was behind the steering wheel.
    Alice always had a secure spot on the top of the pyramid during the halftime show, and no matter how many times my mother wished she’d smile at her, she was always looking out at David. David Anderson, quarterback, ace student, student council president, party animal, tall, good looking, but the thing that made him the most popular was the fact that he was Alice Winslow’s head honcho. In other words, David was my sister’s boyfriend. And the only thing my mother had ever passionately hated about Alice. This was one of the only common bonds my mother and I shared.
    “David!” I could hear from behind me the shrill squeak of my sister’s voice, and her tiny footsteps as they patted down the stairwell. “David’s here!”
    My mother sighed again, and my back hunched over. I rubbed my temples in hope that it would make that BMW go in reverse down the driveway. “Whoops, wrong house.” the unfamiliar driver would say, and drive away, leaving my sister to go back upstairs and leave me alone. Nope, that was only what I hoped for.
    David, black hair sticking up perfectly and his teeth shining bright against the summer sun, shut the car door and left the BMW running in the driveway. Alice’s leg brushed by my shoulder as she ran down the front steps and the walkway. He stood in the driveway waiting for her. “Ugh” my mother and I groaned together as she sprinted towards him.
    I hid my head between my knees and felt a headache coming on. The moment we move in David decides to take a road trip. My mother had encouraged them breaking up due to long distance relationships, or maybe just because she didn’t want to see his running car in her driveway anymore. I was all for this idea, and told Alice so. She never gave in. David was half her heart, the other half being a mix of cheerleading, my mother, and popularity. No way she would give up half of her heart.
    I had always pictured my sister’s heart as bright and pink and maybe even a bit fuzzy. The pretty, symmetrical shaped heart that people always see in the cartoons. My heart, on the other hand, seemed to be the ugly one on the posters in Bio class, the brown one with all the gross organs sticking out and the gooey stuff. Needless to say, my sister’s and my views on love were very different.
    “Don’t rush to get a boyfriend anytime soon,” I heard my mother grumble as she gave the hugging couple the death stare, “okay, Nova?”
    “Roger.” I saluted her affirmatively. “Understood.”
    She leaned back in her fold out lawn chair and propped her feet, one on top of the other, on the porch railing in front of us. She crossed her arms and glared at them from behind her sunglasses. They turned to go inside.
    We heard the garage door open and shut behind us and loud footsteps as they trailed through the house, which still echoed due to lack of furniture. The first thing that had ever gotten my mother to hate David was the fact that he never took his shoes off when going inside the house. This was one of the things I had respected about him. I had wanted to leave my sneakers on when I entered the house ever since I saw people on TV do it. But really, that was the only thing that made David even a bit superior to me.
    “Hey, Pauline. Hi Nova.” He peeked his head out the door casually, almost like he lived here already. Over time, I expected my mother would let him. After enough begging from Alice, my mother would always give in.
    “Please, David, call me Mrs. Winslow.” She wouldn’t even turn to face him.
    I felt like chuckling at David’s failed attempt to greet my mother, but didn’t. Instead, I turned around on the chipped wood steps and said, “Hey, David.” He looked nervously from me to my mother then back to me. He was even better looking than the last time I had seen him. Still, that was not enough for me to pay him any respect.
    “Okay, we’ll be upstairs then.” Alice said, noticing the awkward atmosphere. She pulled at David’s hand and dragged him inside and up the stairs. We heard her door close, and the two of us looked at each other and let out a small laugh. The only thing we agreed on, and that she and Alice disagreed on, was David.
    “Only David would show up the day we move in.” She chuckled.
    I mimicked him, “Hey, Pauline.” I said, sitting up straight and giving her the same fake smile David had. This made her smile. These were the times I actually liked my mother. When we could laugh about David Anderson together and make each other laugh. But whenever I looked back, that was all there was. Never was there anything worth smiling about with my mother unless it focused around my sister’s pathetic boyfriend. Even Dad had hated him. The first time he came over to meet them, Dad grilled him like a shish-ka-bob. He made a point of never coming back when Dad was home. I guess now he had nothing to worry about.
    My first night in Blades was a quiet one, one which I spent by myself. After all my furniture was loaded in that afternoon, in an effort that seemed like it would take up forever and a half, I enjoyed my new room. It was like going to an entirely new place, but I still had a part of my old home with me. I still had my plain white sheets that had a pattern of lighter white polka dots when you looked close enough. And I still had that unfinished lamp that only half lit up that Dad had been determined to build, but never finished. I could savor the sweet smell of home- or my old home- in one of the girliest things I owned, a black stuffed bunny with a pink ribbon and white nose that I had named “Moo” because I thought it looked like a cow when I was little.
    At around eleven o’ clock, I heard the engine outside start up again the gravel being crunched beneath David’s wheels once again, just as it had when he had first arrived. And it was a four hour drive, too. That was real devotion. Or stupidity, depending on how you looked at it. But just a few minutes after, I heard a suspicious knock at the door. I knew Mom was in bed, so I called from my chair in the corner, “Enter.”
    The door creaked open a little, and in popped Alice’s head. Normally either exceedingly hyper or totally bummed, she had found an unknown neutral that I had never seen before. She leaned in the doorway softly and smiled at me. How such a dumb a*s made my sister so happy would remain unknown to me for a long time.
    “Hey.” She said gently, like she was talking to a baby who was already asleep. One, I wasn’t a baby. Two, I was not asleep yet. She had never been so seemingly warm and generous at the old house.
    “Hi.” I said, still a little suspicious. She laughed.
    “What?” She asked.
    I shrugged and put down my book. “I dunno, you just seem... weird.” Obviously, my vocabulary wasn’t at its best right now. “But, not bad weird, just... weird. Like I haven’t seen you like this.”
    She shrugged and hummed a tune to herself before responding, “Yeah.” She said. That was her explanation? Her way of explaining things was even more pathetic than her lackluster boyfriend.
    “And now, today’s hit single.” The song that boomed from my radio stopped, and the announcer introduced the song that had been playing all day that day. It was so stuck in my head, I wasn’t even surprised that I knew the song before it started playing.
    Her eyes widened and her smile inched bigger, spreading further across her cheeks. She pushed herself away from the doorway and said, “Oh, it’s our song.”
    “Our song?” I asked her, glaring at her with a hint of curiosity. I didn’t have a song. I rarely ever listened to music. I didn’t even know this song.
    She chuckled at me and dismissed this thought with a wave of her hand. “Stupid, it’s our song.” She waited for me to catch on. I didn’t. “Come on, you know. When two people have a song... one that describes them.”
    I crossed my legs and turned towards her. “What do you mean?”
    She shrugged. “I’m not sure.” She laughed. “But when you know it’s something special, there’s a song. Like, when you hear it, you think of them.”
    “You mean with David?”
    The giggles that followed answered my question.
    “Alice?”
    “Mmm?”
    “Why are you like this?” I asked her. “What’s the big deal?”
    She looked down and stuck the tip of her fingernail in her mouth nervously, cutely. Alice let her bangs hang down in front of her eyes loosely, like she was embarrassed about something. Maybe it was too cute to tell me.
    She let out a nervous sigh, that I knew was not supposed to sound nervous. She mumbled something under her breath that I couldn’t really make out well, and I asked her to repeat it. She looked up at me, pushed her hair out of her face, and told me, “I’m in love, Nova.” She said it like it was of some interest to me.
    This was really no news to me. I had thought that David and my sister were in love for awhile, mostly because they were the only relationship I had ever known, aside from my parents. And because I was about ten at the time they started dating, it was just easier to connect the words “boyfriend” and “love”. It had made sense to me forever. I tried to show that this came as a surprise, but wasn’t sure if it was working.
    “Nice.” I said.
    This didn’t seem to satisfy my sister, and she pushed herself away from the door. Then she did something I hadn’t seen her do in such a long time, it was miraculous how Foreign a concept it was to me.
    “Night, Nova.”
    “Night.”
    I reached over and turned out the light.

Author's Note

Review as honestly as you can, and specific changes to be made are always appreciated.

Reviews

[Notion]

..."house was a soft green color,..."
Simplyfy this by just saying the House was green. There really is no need to spice up
the color of the house. After all, it only has white windows and black shutters.

"The roof was white wood, paint worn from what I could guess was the rain"
Instead of seperating the ideas, why not combine them? And also, would'nt the roof have shingles?
It's alos a surprise for you to go into first person here. Why not finish this paragraph with just the setting.
Make it about just the house.

"The gutters and pipes were silver metal, but resolved into a red orange rust"
gutters wouldn't be made out of silver metal. They are usually aluminum or tin. Aluminum doesn't rust. I'm not sure about tin.

"The door was small and charcoal black and the white wood porch had a nice swing that I could imagine myself rocking back and fourth on during the long summer days that were to come."
That's a little long winded.

"Mom said, more to herself then us, as she parked the car behind the moving van and stepped outside, shielding her eyes with one of her hands and placing the other promptly on her hip."
Chop up this sentence. Also, who is 'us' in this sentence? You need to clarify this before you throw it in there. your audience still doesn't know much at this point.

"the porch steps" is a little redundant. either go with just steps or just porch.

"The sound of the little portable radio that one of the movers had echoed throughout the empty house from an unknown destination."
What? I think something is missing here. Oh yeah, simplicity. "A radio echoed inside. A mover must have left in on." Your adience don't need useless details like 'unknown destination'. If there is a radio inside the house and you can hear it outside, what more do you need to explain?

"I creaked open the door slowly and peered in, then saw the beauty of it all."
keep it simply and just say "I opened the door and peered inside. It was beautiful." Here you can go into the description without having to slow down the reading.

"Or at least, that’s what I had expected my summer to include"
This forboding is like waving candy in front of a child and taking it away. It's annoying. Let the story unfold to the reader. Don't let your knowledge as the author get in the way of the experience for the reader.

"I jumped from my carpet to the wood floor in the hallway from which I came"
This sentence seems akward to me. I don't know why.

this is getting a little long. I'll finish it up in MS word if you have it.