The New Girl

1

Beaten down Dreams

On the last day of Alexa Brown’s summer vacation, she awoke with a start and immediately crawled out of bed to check to make sure she had everything packed. She was really nervous because tonight would be her first night spent at her new boarding school, Durmon Academy. For the past couple days, she and her father had been driving back and forth to Durmon, because Alexa wanted to make sure she had everything she needed or wanted in her apartment-like room, where she would be living until summer break. Most of the furniture was provided, like the beds and bookshelves and dressers and desks, but pretty much everything else was on you. Alexa had already filled her bookshelves with books, brought three sets of sheets and blankets and made the bed, and brought several decorative-and-useful storage bins, and tonight she would be bringing her clothes, school supplies, decorations, and snack foods, among other things.

The girls’ dormitories were placed in the North Tower, with seven apartment-like rooms on each floor. Each apartment-like room had only one occupant, and all seven rooms had a door in the center of the circle of the tower, where the lounge and the spiral staircase was. Alexa hadn’t yet met the girls she shared the third floor with, and was really nervous. What if the girls don’t like me? Will I be sharing a floor with girls that hate me?

Alexa checked her backpack. Pencils, pens, binders, she ran through the list in her head, folders, notebooks and lots of note paper, bookmarks, school ID, scissors, highlighters, sticky notes, permanent markers, tape, ruler, protractor, calculator, dictionary/thesaurus, homework planner… am I missing anything? She didn’t think so, so she moved on to her suitcases. Durmon Academy had school uniforms, so over the summer, Alexa had bought lots of purple, black, and green blouses, pants, skirts, vests, and jackets. She also made sure she had packed lots of underwear, bras, socks, belts, and jewelry. Alexa checked her toiletries bag for hairbrushes, combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, disposable razors, deodorant, perfume, lip balm, hand lotion, her dandruff shampoo/conditioner, body wash (mint-chocolate chip, no less), anti-static hair-stuff, nail clippers, and nail polish.

Alexa made sure she had her CD/radio stereo, her favorite CDs, (she loves music) her laptop, her snack foods, and all her decorations (including the many academic awards, the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award, and the President’s Award, all of which contributed to her getting a scholarship to Durmon Academy) were safely packed away in various boxes. Now she felt a little more relaxed, but she was still a bit on-edge about being the new girl at such a prestigious school as Durmon.

Alexa got dressed at plopped down in front of her mirrored desk/vanity, and attempted to rip the brush through her blond bed head. Her hair automatically parted down the center, and the ends brushed her shoulders. Recently she had found out that she could pull her hair back into a ponytail for the first time since last winter because she liked to keep her hair short. Alexa put down the brush and looked at her own face. She had always been jealous of the other girls at her regular old public school. They could look so beautiful so easily. She was constantly worried about how other people would see her. Whether or not they really were, she would always think the other, “popular” girls were looking at her as if they were criticizing her. The other girls always looked so pretty.

Alexa always wanted either red or black hair, or if she couldn’t have that, she would want hair that was curly or at least wavy, rather than this stick-straight multi-colored hair. Her hair ranged from bleach-blonde to medium brown, as if it couldn’t decide what color it wanted to be. Her “blue” eyes weren’t really blue at all; for the most part, they were either greenish, or a weird greenish-gray-blue color. Sometimes they were just gray. Her mother had had beautiful bright blue eyes and the prettiest curly red hair. Her father has black hair, so Alexa doesn’t even know where she got the blonde gene.

Alexa sighed and turned away from the mirror. She would miss her room; her private sanctuary were she had laughed, cried, and sang along to her favorite songs at the top of her lungs. Her room looked pretty forlorn now- nearly everything Alexa thought worth having she had already packed away. Suddenly she thought of her photo album. There were so many pictures of her a few years ago, before she went to the school she had, up until very recently, been attending. At her old school, Alexa had had plenty of friends and was part of a really cool group of boys. She had been the only girl in the group, and was respected by those boys nearly as much as their leader and her best friend, Charlie Berret. In fact, Alexa had been the only girl at all of Charlie’s birthday parties for as long as she had known him.

Then in the middle of fifth grade, Charlie transferred to another school, and without him, the group that Alexa had so long called her friends turned on her. She had other friends, too, though; fun-loving Sammie, Sammie’s best friend, Liv, slightly overweight and loud-mouthed Tracy, Alexia, who was just like her in every way, Nina, and Alexa’s best friend in the whole wide world, Tyler G. and his little sister, Amanda. Alexa also had her friends in the neighborhood: little across-the-street Andy, who was like a little sister to Alexa, Conrad, who lived down the street, and, of course, Charlie. Charlie lived across Bronze Lake from Alexa, but after he transferred, he stopped coming over, so Alexa stopped going over. She still cries about that lost friendship.

Alexa collapsed onto her bed with the photo album. There was an entire series of pictures from her second grade birthday party, a pool party that had gotten rained out about halfway through. There was a bunch of pictures of her old friends; there was one of Sammie smiling in a way-too-close close-up, Liv dancing randomly at a big sleepover Alexa once had, in another that also was taken at that sleepover, Tracy waved even though it looks as though she’s half-asleep. There was Charlie’s younger brother and his friends in Charlie’s basement playroom, and one of Alexa, also in Charlie’s basement, where Alexa was laughing at the person holding the camera. There was none of Charlie himself. She really missed him. He had always been just a little bit taller, and his long-for-a-boy blonde hair always made him and Alexa, whose hair is short-for-a-girl, look like twins. Even their parents said so. People that didn’t know them very well always assumed that they were twins, and one time, at recess, Liv had lightly punched Alexa in the stomach because she thought Alexa was Charlie. Alexa sat up and put the photo album in her suitcase.