Hey guys I'm kinda new to this site. This is the first time I've ever written in third person perspective so don't be too harsh haha xD
Chapter 1
All day Valerie Dark begged herself not to cry. Today was her last day at Lacewood High School – the last day she would ever see her friends. She knew she was going to miss the place to pieces. Her mother, Susan Dark, wanted them to leave Lacewood Valley for who knows what reason. Valerie was perfectly happy at the school she was in now and didn’t see why her mother would want her to be anywhere else. Tomorrow they would be packing their bags and heading out of Lacewood Valley forever. Whenever Valerie asked her mother where they were going, she ignored the question until Valerie finally gave up. All Valerie knew was that they were moving a long way away from home. She was already missing Lacewood and they hadn’t even left yet.
Valerie was walking down one of the school hallways with her best friend, Alison Hathaway. Ali was trying very hard to be cheerful and bubbly around her but Valerie could see the same sadness she felt in Ali’s eyes. “I’ll call you like, every day and keep you up to date with all the dirty gossip flying around the school. I promise,” said Ali.
Alison and Valerie shared the same English class together and they both walked into the classroom at the same time as the bell rang. The midday sun shone warmly outside the classroom in a beautiful blue sky. Valerie cursed the sun for daring to shine on probably one of the worst days of her life. She and Ali sat side by side near the middle of the classroom and watched Mr. Betley enthuse about the next topic that they – or should she say the rest of the class – would be learning: Shakespeare. This only made Valerie more miserable. She loved poetry. She loved her friends, and she loved this school. Now she had to leave them all behind. Why did she have to leave them all behind? Valerie was furious at her mother. She could feel her tears about to escape their containers and blinked rapidly, looking down at the desk and letting her long, straight black hair fall in front of her to hide her face. Valerie felt Ali take her hand and squeeze it. Valerie tried to swallow the lump of emotion creeping up her throat. Above everything else it was Ali she would miss the most. They had been friends ever since the start of high school and have been inseparable ever since. How could Valerie ever survive without her? Instead of focusing on her own life she let herself absorb Mr. Betley’s words as he read passionately from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
“We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Jet Dark was just as reluctant to leave as Valerie was. Her older brother – with the jet black hair that had given him his name – stood in the kitchen with his arms crossed and an expression determined to put a stop to this injustice. She knew he would be more successful at trying to freeze Hell than to change their mother’s mind, and Valerie was pretty sure deep down he knew it too. That didn’t stop him from trying though. Nothing had ever stopped him from trying anything.
“I’m not going,” he announced firmly, like he had a choice. “Imagine how Chelsea will feel once I tell her I have to ‘leave and never come back’.” He quoted the last part from yesterday morning when Susan had said it to them and unleashed the shocking news to their ears for the first time. Jet had translated her words afterwards, which Valerie had found bitterly amusing: ‘Hey, I’ve got a brilliant idea! Let’s all fall off the face of the earth and leave the one place we call home. Don’t worry though, I’ll make sure all your happiness is destroyed by forcing you to leave all your friends and popularity behind so we can travel merrily to the middle of freaking nowhere and face social suicide for being the new kids on the block. Now doesn’t that sound just superb?’
Valerie noted how Jet said Chelsea’s name with very little interest. Chelsea was Jet’s ‘girlfriend’ or as Valerie preferred to call the ‘slut of the week’. She knew Jet really didn’t give a damn about Chelsea. He was just looking for more reasons to convince their mum that they all should stay in Lacewood. Though Valerie wasn’t at all impressed that Jet could be so careless about Chelsea, as if she were nothing more than an object, Valerie didn’t mind that he was fighting for the same thing she was.
Susan didn’t reply to Jet as she dished out dinner and placed it on the table. She didn’t even glance at him. It was like she was in her own little world. There was something different about her posture – more tense and jumpy. This morning she had nearly jumped out of her skin when the doorbell had rung, but she relaxed after looking through the blinds of one of the front windows and seeing a little girl with a box of cookies.
“Are we moving because I’m flunking out in all my classes?” Jet asked.
Susan was quiet, apart from the sound of her chair sliding out from the table as she sat down. Wow, she was acting really weird.
Jet carefully sat down after her. Valerie still leaned against the kitchen bench watching the one-sided conversation. “Is it because of that police incident? You know I promised I would never do drugs again,” said Jet. He picked up his fork slowly, not meeting his mum’s eyes. As heartless as Jet could be sometimes Valerie knew he felt guilty for taking those drugs. After Dad left two years ago, Jet was devastated and gravitated towards drugs and alcohol to 'fix the hurt'. He started failing his classes and hanging out with the wrong people. It had broken Susan’s heart when the police had come to the front door one night and told her Jet had been caught in possession of several illegal drugs. Valerie knew he would never intentionally want to let their mother down, for fear of losing her too. Jet looked up after a few seconds of more silence from Susan. “Mum, why aren’t you answering?”
Those words seemed to snap Susan out of her trance and she blinked twice. “Sorry. No, it’s nothing to do with either of you,” she said, but she sounded uncertain.
Not feeling in the mood to eat anything Valerie turned her feet around and started moving towards the stairs.
“Valerie, where are you going?” her mum asked with a concerned look.
“I’m not that hungry,” Valerie replied without looking back. She headed up to her room.
Cardboard boxes took up the majority of the room space, only reminding Valerie that tomorrow this wouldn’t be her room, or her house. The night sky outside her window was a deep velvet sea of stars. The moon was new and darkness concealed the outdoors. Valerie let out a sigh and walked over to the only piece of furniture apart from her bed that hadn’t been packed away yet, the dresser. Its surface was cluttered with small snow globes that friends had given her at Christmas time, a vase full of nearly-dead flowers alongside a small mirror, some scattered bobby pins and the clear crystal Gran had given her before she’d died. Valerie picked up the crystal and held it in her hand. It was about the size of her fist. It had a rough texture and didn’t look all that special or of any value, yet she had kept it for Gran’s sake. Gran had thought it was important. Valerie took the crystal over to the boxes and placed it in one of them to take to wherever the hell they were going. She considered going to sleep even though it was only about six o-clock, and she wasn’t tired. She didn’t see the point in staying up just so her thoughts could remind her over and over again that she was leaving tomorrow and that this was her last night in Lacewood Valley. She went over to the dresser to change into her sleepwear, catching a quick glance at her fair skin and sad blue eyes in the small mirror. That’s when the doorbell rang downstairs.
It looks like you already edited for all of the punctuation I pointed out, so I'll skip over that. So...speed review recap, here we go!
Show don't tell. A lot of writers struggle with this concept. Let the reader come to their own conclusions based on the interactions between characters.
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