Dakota Girl

                                                                    Dakota Girl

                                                                      Chapter 1

        “Emily,” my mom said, shaking my shoulder to wake me up, “we’re here.” Still half asleep, I stretched my arms and yawned loudly. We were finally here in South Dakota, an obnoxiously open land that had nothing but land in every direction and the nearest neighbor, if you’re lucky, a tenth of a mile away. I knew this was going to suck like hell; all my friends were back in Richmond, Virginia, and I really didn’t want to leave at all. But, since mom had divorced dad three year age and was barely making ends meet, when a better paying job opportunity was offered here, in Dakota, she jumped on it and here we are. This isn’t the first time I had moved with mom, but I had just begun to warm up to people in school and have good friends and now I had to start all over again at something I’m not very good at: making friends and keeping them.
         “Come on, Emily,” she shouted, kindly, “I can’t move all these boxes inside by myself and, Lord knows, they won’t move themselves.”
         “Comin’,” I replied with another yawn.
         She laughed at that, while I was finally getting out of the pick-up truck to help get the boxes inside. “What am I going to do with you?” mom said, half laughing, half sighing.
         “Get me a java-chip frappuccino from Starbucks to wake me up?”
         Again, she chuckled and she shook her head at my response, walking away with another box. As I watched her go, I took the opportunity to analyze the house I was to live in for… who knows how long. Well, it’s not exactly what you’d call a dream house, but it looked comfortable, at least on the outside. It was a small little shack with pale yellow shingles and white shutters. There was also a small porch in the front, which already had a wooden rocking-chair on it. “This isn’t that bad,” I thought, as I approached the house with a box full of my stuff. However, as I got closer, I realized that the paint was all cracked and chipped, and wood was missing in the shudders and in the railing around the porch. I couldn’t help but let out a sigh. This was going to be a lot of work for me to do alone, since mom wasn’t very handy with tools and she had to work from 7am tomorrow morning to about 6pm that night.
         “Well,” I thought as I entered the run-down place, “the good thing is I’ll have something to do for the rest of the summer, though there’s only two more weeks left.” I sighed again as I walked into the house and realized just how tinny it was. There was only one bedroom, which was at the back of the shack, one bathroom with a shower, which was connected to the room, a small kitchen on the other side of the bathroom wall, and barely enough room for a dining room and a living room. Right then, I prayed, so hard, that I wouldn’t have to share my mom’s room with her.
         She noticed my unease and showed me to a walk-in closet in the living room. When she opened the door, I hoped she wasn’t going to force me to be another Harry Potter, but, then, I noticed a string on the ceiling. Mom pulled it down and revealed a fold-able stairway to the attic. “I hope you don’t mind too much,” she said softly, knowing I was very picky when it came to my room. “I figured you like it more than sharing a room with me.”
         ‘Damn right,’ I thought. “It’s cool,” I replied aloud, pretending that it was really cool to have a room in a wooded, probable really dirty, attic. However dirty it could be, anything is better than sharing a room with my mom.
         “Well,” she asked after I had just stood there for a few minutes, staring up into the attic, “aren’t you going to check it out, see how you like it?”
         “I guess,” I lamely replied. “I was just trying to figure out how we would get furniture and my stuff up there without ripping off the top of the house.” There was absolutely no way furniture was going to get up there otherwise, but I really didn’t want to create another task I’d have to do once the furniture was in place.
         “Don’t worry about that, Emi,” my mom chuckled, “a friend of mine, Bill, came by a few days ago, and set up all your furniture. As for the rest of your belongings,” she continued, gesturing to the box I had in my hands, “the boxes should be easiest to get up on your own, but I might have to pass some of the bigger stuff up to you.”
         “ ‘Kay.” And with that, I thundered up the stairs. It was quaint up there; it was larger than mom’s room and very spacious. Around the whole room, there were five windows, two facing the front, one over my bed, which was towards the middle of the room and pushed to the farthest wall, and the other two parallel to the ones facing the front of the house. Since it was about 11 in the morning, there was a nice bright light through the windows at the back of the house, which were facing east. It was quite cozy and already felt like home.
         The rest of the room…my room, was just as bright as the light which was passing through my windows. My bed was a twin size with light blue sheets and a fluffy pillow to match. There was another pillow, shaped as a star, arrayed in front of the other pillow so as to give bed character, and yet make it look welcoming, which it did. Along with my well arranged bed was an artist’s desk filled with drawing and painting supplies and a bookshelf dressed in all my favorites, classics, and others that I had either wished to read or had never heard of before. At this realization, I dropped the box I had been carrying and grabbed one of my favorite books from the shelf, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. As I flipped through the pages, taking in the wonderful smell of the pages as they turned, I worshiped my mom for suggesting to sell some of my things before we left Virginia.
    When I came to the very last page of the book, Inkspell, I noticed an envelope that had my name on it. Gingerly, I placed the book on my bed and opened the envelope; the letter was written in Bill’s distinctive hand. It read:
                      Emily,
            Before I left Virginia to help set up your new house, your mother mentioned that you enjoyed reading quite a lot and was extremely saddened when you had to leave some behind. So, I was able to salvage the books and bought some others for your leisure. Your mother also mentioned that you enjoyed drawing and painting, and I was able to find some supplies that might work well. Let me know if they don’t and I’ll see what I can do. I hope you like them.
                        Bill
      Tears came to my eyes as I clutched the letter to my chest. It was very rare for anyone to do anything nice for me without making me feel bad about it. And, so far, he was one of, only, a few people who had ever treated me as a normal seventeen-year-old who has issues, not as a fully mature adult who has to run the whole world.