Chapter Text
It’s an autumn evening, so heavy in its cold. Marion Bowles sits cross-legged on her windowsill, seventeen years old, daddy’s little girl and heading straight to an Ivy League college. At least, according to her family she is.
Tonight her heart feels heavy and stale, her day of school echoing the last three years of her life. There’s been enough uniformity to blend months and months into indistinguishable memories. This makes Marion itch with an untraceable desire and boundless frustration. Something has to change.
She’s sitting in her silk pyjamas, a book in her lap, breathing in the frost and sweet smell of rotting leaves through the open window. She can see lines of houses and their patchwork roofs stretching away in soft streetlight. It feels like anything could happen. A neighbourhood dog could grow wings and fly gracefully in choreographed loops over the house next-door and she wouldn’t even be surprised. Tonight feels just a little bit magical, but still Marion is trapped inside. It’s a painful truth, a prison sentence dressed in designer labels and apathy.
Marion loves the night, always has. She thinks that it’s something about the way the shadows hug the figures on the lawn of the neighbours’ house. They’re always having parties, those people. The music is rough and powerful, the texture of its roaring sound unsettling Marion’s stomach and making her feel like everything she’s been waiting for is possible.
They have a daughter, around her age she thinks. But she goes to the public school on the other side of town, and Marion has never been brave enough to say even a hello. Tonight they’re at it again, the lights blinking cheerily underneath the large trees in the yard and scores of people milling around. These people don’t ‘mill’ like her parent’s type of people though. There’s no expensive champagne, polite but pointless small talk, or discussion of recent art acquisitions. From what she can see from the window, Marion thinks that there's only bottles, loud music, and laughter. The kind of laughter that reaches up into her house, grabs her heart and screams in glorious freedom.
Oh to be down in that yard and slouched beneath the trees, making her dress muddy. To be that girl next door.