The gray clouds wept their pain through the pouring rain and the sun hid its glow. It had been like this for a couple of days now here in Breccia. The grass and trees were stained wet, and the sidewalks were covered in mud.
Evelyn sat on her bed looking through the window, wishing the sun would show its face. Evelyn’s stomach growled: She hadn’t eaten since the morning. For breakfast she only ate a single egg, and that surely wasn’t sufficient. It was six o’clock now, and the sun was about to set.
Evelyn climbed out of her bed. Her room wasn’t big. The walls were white and her curtains were yellow. In the corner of the room was a door to her bathroom and in the other corner was a walk-in closet.
She made her way to the door and opened it. The rest of her house was also white, the walls and the furniture. She proceeded down the hallway and to a staircase. She stepped down each step, feeling the carpet beneath her soles.
“Mom, Dad?” Evelyn called out when she reached the bottom of the stairs. No one replied—she couldn’t tell if her parents were home, or out doing something. Her parents never paid attention to what Evelyn was doing, how she felt or where she was. All her parents’ attention directed toward their jobs. She checked around the house to confirm her suspicions. She was right; no one was home. At this point, her hunger was unbearable—she lay her hands on her stomach, trying to reach the kitchen. But she was in her formal living room and the fridge was a long way to go.
After a slow agonizing walk to the kitchen, Evelyn finally made it. She extended her right arm and latched on to the handle of the fridge. She opened the door, and stared at the food inside. A few seconds flew by; she decided to grab the left-over salad. Her mom didn’t let her eat any processed foods and definitely no sugar, so a salad was all she could eat. She closed the fridge and made her way back to her bedroom.
Evelyn grabbed onto the door knob and pushed open the door. She turned on the lights and went straight to her desk. A stack of paper covered a fourth of her desk. Evelyn was in seventh grade, and the workload wasn’t friendly. Although it was a Friday night, the teachers at St. Jackson Junior High didn’t play when it came to homework. Evelyn hated how much work school assigned, and she felt like her whole life was about school. She wished she could go out in the world and explore, but reality wasn’t on her side.
She opened the lid of the container and took a bit of salad—the croutons crunched in her mouth. The peeled a piece of paper off of the stack of assignments, and read the top. It stated, “English argumentative essay due on May eighth.” It was a rubric and instructions for an essay that was due in four days. Evelyn tended to procrastinate a lot. She grabbed another sheet of paper, it was a math assignment. She had enough motivation to start this worksheet. Evelyn located her pencil and got to work.
