As I walked back home, the story I would tell Ethan slowly formed in my head.

Maybe I'll add a lot of drama, make the breakup seem hurtful and heart breaking. As I'd said earlier, I was a good liar, I could lie about anything and not get caught, along with that I had an uncanny ability to tell if someone was lying, something which more than once helped me figure things about other people.

There was one problem though, while I was very good at figuring people out, I still didn't know much about myself.

Sure, I knew my favourite music and movies, I knew I loved reading, loved writing and, well, this list could go on forever.

I knew what I loved in the materialistic world, I just didn't know what made Emmaline Wilson, Emmaline Wilson.

Why the fuck are you thinking about yourself?

I don't know.

You just clamed to be smart, act like it. Smart people don't think about themselves.

Nodding to myself, I looked up and focused on walking faster.

Although my house was in a quiet neighbourhood, with old people and cats, the park which was about twenty minutes from home wasn't. It was a pretty dangerous place to in, even the path to the park was dangerous.

The park along with the cafe had been put there almost 20 years, by the old people around my neighbourhood when they were young and had kids who could play there.

Obviously, now that the kids had grown up, the park was now occupied by drug addicts, the very same old people who had built the park there long ago, reliving the memories of their kids who left to live their lives and were too busy to come visit their parents and teenagers who wanted to lose their virginities in the bushes.

Yes I'd actually seen the latter happen, or rather escaped from watching it before I ended up questioning horny teenagers how wise they were to screw in a bush, with leaves, bugs and thorns.

Seriously, there were so many chances of more than a guy's family jewels entering the girl's private part. What with all those inquisitive bugs.

I gagged at my thoughts. Needless to say, I had quite a lot of unneeded ones, which could land me in a mental asylum if spoken aloud.

There were a few people though, people who didn't think I had to take a trip to a psychiatrist for my mental health.

There were only a few people who could deal with the randomness coming out of my mouth- when I let it, that is.

Speaking of randomness, where was I? Right, the way back home.

The road back home was dangerous, but not in a muggers-and-rapists-every-corner way, more like horny-college-dropouts-whistling-at-every-pretty-girl way.

Since I wasn't the prettiest girl out here, that wasn't a problem. Even if someone did try something with me, well, there's a reason I spend more than 3 hours a day learning the best way to punch people, and I was sure that training could be put to good use.

That was also one of the reasons my parents didn't mind me walking around on my own, they knew I was more than capable of giving someone an ass whopping they'd remember their entire life if they tried anything with me.

Just because I could beat an untrained person up, didn't mean I could beat someone in an official boxing match with judges, because unlike what most people think, boxing is a sport which requires technique, skill, strength, agility, endurance and a hell lot of patience. You can't just plunge your fist into you opponent's face and win a proper boxing match, there's lot more to it. Boxing can even be considered a kind of dance, if the two boxers are well-trained and evenly matched. It's an art, something a lot of people never understand, one of them being Aiden, aka, the guy who supposedly broke my heart- at least that's what I told Ethan.

While a part of me was unhappy about the lie, the other part wasn't. What was wrong with a little lie anyway? Heck, the lie was probably better that telling Ethan the truth, the lie could help him recover from his past.

As I continued on my way home, I noticed how empty the streets had become, empty and dark.

I took in a deep breath of the chilly air and looked up. The sky was slowly getting darker, the clouds were gathering, hanging low, ready to start a downpour at any given moment, not that I had any issues with rain. I was okay with rain.

I shivered and zipped Jack (you know, the jacket?) up. I hated cold weather. I didn't mind rain, snow, summer heat or even a hailstorm. Anything but the cold.

That was also the reason I loved Jack so much, he protected me from cold. Cold was bad, cold was horrible,it numbed your fingers, gave you a headache, blocked your nose and in the process, messed up your normal way of talking. When you have a cold, your voice comes out nasally, which makes you want to stop talking.

Speeding up, I took the next left. My place was in this lane, two houses away.

I walked faster, smiling. The thought of going home to my cosy, warm bed was comforting.

Maybe I'll even get a little studying done. I thought for the third time today. After all, my finals were only a few weeks away. My final exams which would decide whether I could go to LSI (London School of Economics) or not.

Until now, I had a good record and pretty much everything I needed to get into LSI, my dream college, all I had to do was get good grades in my finals, then even if I didn't get accepted into it, I didn't have myself to blame.

Going to LSI had always been my dream, when I thought college, I thought LSI.

I'd already sent my applications to a bunch of colleges along with an application to LSI, the only thing left was the acceptance or rejection letter.

With Economics being my favourite subject after English Literature, I badly wanted to go to LSI and do a majors in Economics and minors in business.

It was true I wanted to be a journalist working for a big company, writing about things people overlooked, things which mattered in this world and do my own bit to help make this world a better place. Just like Michael Jackson said we should.

I probably sounded like a 90 year old man, thinking philosophical stuff. But it was true, I wanted to be a journalist, I just wasn't sure if it was the right thing for me, journalism didn't work for everyone.

So, I'd decided to go through with college, get a degree in my second favourite subject, get a job and then work on the journalism dream, I could hopefully take a learning course in it and see where it would lead me.

My life never went the way I planned though, so if I ended up starting a pastry shop in the near future, I didn't think I'd be very surprised.

My parents were as supportive as any parents, they wanted me to do whatever I loved as long as I was good at it and enjoyed it.

I finally passed by the two houses which preceded my own and stopped in front of mine.

There, sitting in the middle of our abnormally large garden, stood my mom's black car.

The dim light coming from my house's windows shone on it, making it look sinister.

My mom was home, and I wasn't.

Pulling my phone out from Jack, I checked if I had any missed calls from her.

I gulped.

Five missed calls. Five.

I glanced at the house door, it suddenly didn't look like my way into comfort and cosiness, it looked more like the door to my personal hell.

Although I loved my parents to death, I had a feeling my mom would show me exactly what it was for not telling her that I went to the park.

Switching off my phone so that she'd have one less thing to scream at me for (we had a cellphone charger crisis at home, by now we must have bought more than 30 of them in the last 5 years, and dad managed to lose all of them, we only had 1 now, which my dad had taken for his night shift in the hospital), I could always claim that I ran out of battery.

I stepped forward with my right foot, ready to face any demons thrown at me, or anything the demon throws at me.

-----------------------

"Hey mom." I said, as I opened the door slowly and stuck my face inside. If anything went bad, I'd have a good chance to escape, since the rest of my body was outside.

Mom sat on the couch, in front of our TV, which didn't always work for multiple reasons, some of them being me.

She looked up slowly from the newspaper she was reading and narrowed her brown eyes at me.

I smiled nervously and forced myself to get into the house completely, shutting the door behind me.

Dumping my school bag from my right and my boxing kit from my left onto the floor, I made my way towards her, dodging the coffee table on the way.

She folded her arms and pursed her lips, reminding me of a certain Mr. Grumpy.

I couldn't help bit smile at the thought, mom would definitely freak out if she knew the company I was associating myself with.

"I went to the park." There was no point in beating around the bush, might as well get this over with.

She nodded, a piece of her dark hair came out from her loose bun and covered her eyes.

She pushed it away in irritation. "Em, you have one of the most important exams in your life coming up in a few weeks, and you just spent almost 3 hours wasting your time in a park, doing nothing. This is not right."

I didn't correct her on the 'doing nothing' part. Better to let her think I was just wasting time than spending time with drug-addicts.

"I know."

"Then why do you do this? You do know how important these are, don't you? Going to the wrong college could mess up your life." Her eyes were wide, sad, she didn't want her only daughter to fail and end up working as a waitress in someone's restaurant, she wanted me to be the someone who owned it.

"I know, I'll start from tomorrow." I hadn't even realized that I'd spent so long at the cafe, I was just so caught up with Ethan's story.

"You say that every single time, you never get to work. It's just for a few weeks, can you please focus on what's important?" She said desperately, her eyes full of worry.

Although this sounded dramatic, mom had a good reason for acting like this.

Most her teen life she had been controlled by a man: her father.

Thomas Mercks was a man built on gender roles. He spent all his life controlling the only women in his life- my mom and his wife.

If given the choice, Thomas would have somehow managed to get my mom married to another male chauvinist like him.

Mom was around 17, fresh out of high school, when Thomas was already planning mom's wedding the moment she would turn 18.

That, thankfully, didn't work his way though, mom had brothers, a lot of them, and even though all of them had grown with Thomas's belief that women were not equal to men, that they only existed to pop babies, they realized just in time that this wasn't the 18 century and my grandfather Thomas's idea to get mom maried to a rich, 50 year old man to pop babies for him was illegal. They got mom out of Thomas's grasp by practically kidnapping her from his house, with him in the same house.

Grandpa Thomas wasn't happy, so he threatened to call the cops on his own sons.

The sons (my amazing uncles!) threatened him back with the exposure of the truth.

They basically threatened to go to the cops with the real story.

Grandpa Thomas backed off, and mom managed to go to college and become doctor.

There times when mom told me that she'd only married dad because she knew that even if dad turned out to be like Grandpa, she'd be able to get away from him if she wanted to.

She hated feeling helpless, and she didn't want me to be helpless either, she wanted me to be someone who was capable of standing on her feet.

Noticing the dark circles around her eyes and the way she was stooping, I realized that she was pretty exhausted, and right now, it was the exhaustion speaking.

Being an oncologist can be pretty exhausting.

"Mom, you need to get some sleep."

"I know." She sighed.

"Go get some sleep, we'll talk tomorrow, okay?"

She continued staring at me, her eyes wide, as she tried to fight the sleep coming over her.

"I'll just go and study now, okay?"

"Don't waste any time."

"I won't."

She nodded slowly walked away, teetering a little on the way to the bedroom.

I was glad the bedroom wasn't upstairs, I wasn't sure she'd be able to walk up a flight of stairs in such a tired state.

The last thing I wanted was for her to fall down from the stairs.

Grabbing both, my school bag and my boxing kit, I hurried upstairs to my room.

I was the only person who had my room upstairs. My parents and Ed had their rooms downstairs, right beside the kitchen.

While I was at a disadvantage with the kitchen situation, what with having to walk downstairs everytime I wanted food, my room gave me a lot of privacy, so much that I could even blast pop music and not have dad run upstairs and break my speakers.

Dad hated pop music, mom could tolerate it, but dad would rather cut off his ears than bear with the 'disguting and ridiculously nonsensical popular music', as he called it. That was probably why his left ear didn't function properly. Maybe he cut off his left eardrum when he got sick of listening to pop music when he was smaller.

At least, that's what he told me, that he'd poked a pencil into his ear when he got sick and tired of listening to Taylor Swift when his brother played it.

Apparently he'd done it when he was just ten.

He'd been telling me the same story ever since I started listening to Taylor Swift's music.

Now that I was older, I noticed a couple of holes in his story, one of them being the fact that dad was too poor to buy anything that played music when he was that young, heck, his parents used to struggle to get his three meals a day.

Another being the fact that dad didn't have a brother and when he was just ten, Taylor Swift wasn't even born.

Although I'd already pointed out the flaws in his story, dad stuck to it.

I think he only did it to guilt trip me for listening to music by an artist who apparently made him partially deaf.

"She made me lose my left ear Em, I can't believe you're actually buying her albums and indirectly paying her for ruining my left ear." He'd say.

I'd just laugh and point out how Wikipedia said Taylor Swift wasn't even born when he was ten and lost his left ear.

Then he'd say "I can't believe you're trusting a stupid website more than your own flesh and blood. I'm telling you, as the man who gave you life, that women is a devil, she's out to destroy innocent people's ears." With a hand on his heart, pretending to be hurt.

Yeah, like, an International pop singer like Taylor Swift had nothing to do than destroy people's hearing capacities.

Let's just say, I got my dramatic side from my father, who was very bad at lying. Thankfully, my lying capabilities were passed down from Grandpa Thomas, who was so good at it, that his own wife called him cunning fox most of her life.

Surprisingly enough, she actually loved him. Something I only knew because that was the last thing she told me on her deathbed.

Grandpa Thomas and the rest of my extended family including my mom's and dad's side didn't exactly get along after the whole forced arranged marriage thing. But for some reason, his wife, my grandmother I got along well.

When she was moments away from dying, she had wanted to see me alone.

I was just 14 back then and the thought of my grandma dying in front of me scared me a lot.

But I went in, and watched her pass away while she whispered about how much she loved grandpa Thomas, how it hurt that her only daughter had left her, how she wished she could change the things that she'd done by not standing up for herself, how she was glad she would meet grandpa in heaven.

I sighed and pushed those memories away. I still regretted not spending two of my summers with her.

As I walked upstairs, my eyes fell on the quotations lining the stair wall, they were printed in bold on papers, stating encouraging things like 'no guts, no glory', 'practice makes perfect', 'be yourself'.

These quotations had been put there by dad, who was so in love with any kind of words of wisdom that our entire stair wall, gym and every empty space on the wall upstairs was covered it, which if looked at from a distance, looked like a kindergartener took a crayon and had his way with the walls.

In the beginning, when I was smaller, I used to hate having to see so many serious things every day, but over the years, I'd fallen in love with them, just like my dad.

I even went one step ahead and printed all my favourite tumblr quotes and stuck them up in my room. Every bit of my room wall was covered with printed quotes.

On reaching the top of the stairs, I made my way to the first room on the right and opened the door.

Dumping my bags on the ground, I switched on the light and shut the door behind me.

My room was exactly as I'd left it in the morning, the same messy bed overflowing with clothes, the only desk and chair carrying the burden of a bunch of completely unnecessary (according to my parents) books, the entire floor littered with the clothes I'd forgotten to throw for laundry in the morning (hey, I woke up at six everyday, I was entitled to forgetting laundry), a pair of boxing gloves and to top it all off, sitting on top of the books was a hot pink sports' bra.

My room was definitely the second best room in the world, only coming after my underground one- the garage.

My mom didn't share my opinion about my room though, both my parents agreed that my room had a lot of resemblance to a pigsty.

Taking off my shirt slowly, I let it fall to the ground as I made my way to my bathroom.

Yeah, I had a bathroom attached to my room, there's a reason I loved it so much.

Kicking off my pants, I stepped into the bathroom, turned the shower on and relaxed into the water.

--------------------------------

After spending almost an hour in the shower and successfully depleting 50% of earth's water resources, I stepped out of my room wearing another pair of sweats, an extra-large shirt, a fuzzy feeling in my head and a grumbling in my stomach.

I needed food, fast.

Having to walk all the way downstairs just for food was irritating, but food is worth every sacrifice. Don't we all live to eat?

Downstairs, Ed was sitting on the couch with a bunch of books spread out in front of him, there was a pen in his right hand as he sincerely worked away on his homework.

Although Ed had his days of insincerity towards school work, he was usually the good kid who was loved by his teachers for the hard work he put into education.

Ah, how well I still remembered those days, when teachers used to shower compliments on me everyday.

Now, if they were in a good mood, the best they could do was a small smile.

"Hey Ed." I said as I reached the kitchen.

He didn't reply.

"Do you want dinner? I'm heating it up." Looking through the fridge, I pulled out last night's dinner, which just consisted of a lot of different kinds of greens I couldn't even name.

Unhealthy food was a big no-no to mom, we never had any junk food at home, and then she wondered why I made so many trips to the grocery store.

"Sure, what's for dinner?" He responded, now that I was talking about food.

And mom said Ed wasn't like me.

"Some green stuff." I answered, tossing the so called 'green stuff' into the microwave to heat it.

"Don't you know what it is?"

"No, I don't make a habit of trying to have the names of every green plant on the back of my hands."

I heard him sigh loudly."Don't worry, no one does except mom."

I grinned and sat beside him."What are you doing?"

"Homework."

"What homework?"

"Math."

No wonder he was frowning, math could put even the most good natured person in a bad mood.

The beep beep from the microwave signalled the end of our conversation.

Pulling out the 'green stuff', I distributed it into four plates. I left two of them on the table for dad when he comes home and mom when she wakes up, dropped one by at the couch for Ed and headed upstairs to my room with mine.

I ate as quickly as a human can possibly eat a bunch of leaves mashed together, then started on my preparation for my exams.

When the chance came, I ditched biology and chemistry, which left me with math, economics, history, English literature and physics.

Out of all these, math was the only problem. Math and I just didn't get along. Calculus, algebra, trigonometry and anything related to math might have as well been in Greek, it never made sense to me.

I could have opted out of math, but I chose to keep it because it was a challenge, and a big one at that for me.

There were times I doubted the wisdom of the decision.

I think I spent more than 2 hours just to solve a couple of problems, then I gave up.

Pushing my math books off the bed and on to the messy floor, I picked up my phone.

The article I'd put up on the amateur writer's website had received another five reads from the last time I'd checked it.

Once I'd finished checking all the notifications, I looked for the book which contained everything I knew about Ethan and started typing the first part of my article.

The clock on my phone showed 10pm. If I wanted to survive coach Horry tomorrow morning, I needed at least 7 hours of sleep, which meant not writing and going to sleep right now.

I'll sleep at 11, I thought. One hour won't make that much of a difference will it?

Yeah, I'll do that.

Unfortunately, I was so engrossed in writing that it was 1am, just like last night, before the lights were turned off by me.

Author's note: So, yeah, the 7th chapter, I know this looks like a filler, but it took me more than three days to type this. I'm trying to show a little bit of Em's life and charecter. Please comment and let me know what you think, I'm in need of as much criticism as I can get if I want to improve.

Thanks for reading :)

Cyan

Ps: This is unedited, so if there are any mistakes, please point it out, I need to edit it.