Chapter 1: The Same Old Boring Kind Of Life

Chapter 1: The Same Old Boring Kind Of Life

Layla's Bedroom,144 W. Guthrie Road, The Quinn Residence, W. Main Highway, Temperance, South Dakota.... 

       Golden rays from an unrelenting sun seemed to burst through the thick beige drapes that lined the windows of a single bedroom on the east end of a small two bedroom house in the backwoods. It was a yellow house, a significant thing to remember due to all of the surrounding trees and dark brown soil that made the place really feel like home aside from the gravel road that lead out to the main highway which was covered in thick black asphalt and smelled heavily of readily replaced black tar.  The trees provided a good deal of shade, but it depended where the sun was heavily focused and how determined it was to burst through the drapes. The baby blue eyes of a formerly slumbering sixteen year old girl opened to the new morning as wet tears began to dry along her supple pale colored cheeks. 

It seemed to always be this way whenever she woke up in the morning. For as long as she could remember she often found that she'd start the day after crying in her sleep. She didn't know how she could despite not recalling much from her dreams nor why she had as she had no time for tears in her daily waking hours despite the hardships each new day would bring. Like always she'd been up with the sun, and careful not to awaken her slumbering father Jerret Quinn or the dog Brutus, an enormous rottweiler dog often given to bouts of unwarranted drooling, which she had not been too fond due to Jerret using the foul beast to intimidate her on occasion when she'd only been a little girl.

It was only the three of them in the two bedroom yellow house at the end of the makeshift gravel road amid the forests along the vast highway, her mother had long since departed leaving her father with a kid to raise all on his own in the wake of her bailing on them and then getting herself killed via the strange men she hooked up with when she abandoned them to life without her. 

From what the formerly slumbering sixteen year old girl could recall, her mother was a blonde with green eyes and wore much too much makeup even for a sunny afternoon. She had always hated the married life and seemed none too fond of being a mother at her "young" age despite being head over heels in love with Jarret. 

It was enough to make her gag on some nights as her parents were not at all in the business of keeping their daughter innocent and neutral to their way of life. She could often hear them in the late hours of the night going at it like rabid dogs and their fights when not being shouting matches often escalated to an all out brawl with the occasional clashing of dishes flying across the house and broken glass littering the floor every morning after. 

Her parents were big on drink and sex, often having parties that depicted both despite her being a mere child hold up in her room and much too afraid to venture out to go to the bathroom and getting their unwanted attention which often lead to drugged out strangers having sex on the sofa and floor and her naked and equally high parents doing the same. 

She despised the way they lived and once her mother had been dead she made it a point never to go down that route. She convinced her father to let her go to school and he agreed, but she was restricted to school only and no visitors and no staying out past the curfew he set for her. It had not crossed her mind that he only agreed to let her attend school to keep the police off his back due to her not getting a proper education, she was younger then and simply wished to have a means of getting out of the house and out of the woods where her only company aside from Brutus the dog were various rats, snakes, and deer that wandered onto the property at strange times. 

Shaking off the remainder of the fog of sleep, the sixteen year old girl with dark brown hair and baby blue eyes moved toward the back of her bedroom door where a long rectangular mirror caught a glimpse of her thin pale body beneath a long forest green t-shirt that came to her knees. She was average sized when it came to height and seemed a bit on the flat side chest wise. She was partially glad of it, as many of the older men seemed to take notice of her slowly filling out and becoming a woman and at the same time she wanted at least one of the many boys she attended high school with to appreciate her awkward form.

Taking another disappointed look at her small breasts before her blue eyes settled upon her unruly brown locks that dangled well past her breasts and shoulders, she sighed given to a frown at her unseemly appearance. There was nothing particularly special about her but her father remained the overprotective sort and locked her in her room for much of her life. She hardly ever spoke to anyone outside of school and it was in large part due to her father and his being insane to the rest of the town. 

On one hand, she seemingly understood it, as he had already lost her mother to the vile ways of life outside their quiet home and she was all he had left. Well, she and Brutus that was. Jarrett Quinn spent a good deal of time in town and had known quite a few beautiful and ugly women alike but he more or less could be found with his backside firmly planted in the large brown arm chair that took up a quarter of the living room, wearing a dirty white men's tank top and wearing a pair of his boxer shorts exposing his knobby pale knees and hair thin legs as he gripped a shiny silver can of ice cold beer and glared at the dark wood floor model television set across the room narrowing his eyes at the people that came on and muttering to himself about how pretentious each celebrity was. Brutus would be at his heel or lying in his makeshift doggy bed consisting of old sheets and a folded and thoroughly chewed up comforter that Jarrett had tossed out.

The sixteen year old girl stared at her reflection in the mirror once more before moving toward the brown dresser on the opposite side of her room as she began fishing out her chosen attire for the day. She wasn't much for ironing, as she did plenty of that for Jarrett as well as all of the household chores which included all of the cooking and skinning of his hunting prizes "like her mother use to" as he often reminded her. 

She wasn't like her mother, she didn't drink excessively or party with druggies and have wild orgy sex parties while walking about in the nude when she knew she had a child in the house, she didn't run away from her responsibilities and get herself killed by some weirdo she didn't know very well. 

She was Layla Quinn, sixteen years old and a well rounded and responsible young woman with knowledge about the world due to avid studies and she was determined not to end up barefoot and pregnant  in a marriage to some low level scumbag asshole like her loser of a mother or her other female classmates. She had dreams of getting out of the shady backwood town and seeing the world while living a life of her own. She had read about many places better than Temperance, South Dakota and the vast winding roads that lead away from it. Most of the time it was her studies that seemed to keep her focused and from succumbing to the mundane aspects of life in this horrid place. 

Layla took note of the time and began getting ready for school. She knew Jarrett would be passed out from his latest drunken binge in front of the television with that wretched mutt he called a dog beside him and it was the perfect time to hightail it to school and avoid having to do his errands for the morning which often made her late and she received numerous detentions because of it.

Slipping out of her t-shirt and shuffling into her tight fitting black sports bra, Layla examined her cotton white panties and sighed. Her thighs were not ideal in her mind and she didn't enjoy the aspect of her arse getting more and more profound due to the unwanted attention it brought but she was pressed for time and wanted to get to school before the bell. She already had to catch the bus and the wait was already going to be eating away at the minutes. 

Layla carefully shuffled her way into a pair of denim jeans and white cotton socks as she grabbed a black t-shirt from her drawer and pulled it over her head tossing her long brown locks into a slick ponytail and turned her attention toward her pair of gray sneakers and the black book bag that carried all of her much needed school stuff as well as the her journal, where she composed all of her short stories and little poems that caught her attention when reading in the library, she wasn't much of a poet, but she liked them just the same.

Having acquired everything she needed as well as dressed fully when grabbing the gray hooded sweatshirt she always seemed to favor when setting out, she finally took her leave of her bedroom and ventured into the living room where she took note of her overbearing father, Jarret Quinn, snoring loud enough to wake the dead while clutching his can of half empty beer.

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes especially when the unwanted vile scent of his constant gassbreaking and the stench of old corn chips filled the living room due to his bare feet sticking straight into the air due to his chair. Layla stifled a gag and made her way to the front door. She unlocked it careful as not to awaken her father and his dog as she ventured out the front screen door and then the heavy white wooden door before finally stepping out onto the porch closing and locking each door behind her. She always found it odd that her father had put the screen on the inside and the heavy door on the outside, but she supposed it had a lot to do with his given interest in watching everything when it was opened. 

Layla stepped off the porch and into the fresh open air gasping for breath after releasing the one she held after being subjected to the collective stench of her father and Brutus the dog. She took a big breath and made her way along the winding highway toward one of the two bus stops that would finally take her to the local high school.