I was born on the fourteenth of March when the channels were just switching off for the evening. My birth mother's name was Marlene; I know nothing else about her. I grew up in a little house in a small suburb of Boston which had been built almost crooked so I always felt I was sliding backwards away from my goal. My mother's carpet smelled of peppermint and her aprons of chocolate; this was because she was a chocolatier. My father, who was my uncle until I was five or six, was taller than she was. She would grab his collar before he went to work, haul him to her level, and kiss him. They sometimes noticed I was there and stopped, so I came up with ways to go unnoticed.
My mother was not as much my parent as my friend. I didn't mind this. She did parental things, such as teaching me to write and taking me with her to work where I made fondant before I was nine but didn't rollerskate until I was thirteen, but above all we did friend things, like shopping, sports events, and movies. I was always very social at these events, talking to the people around me without regard for difference. It didn't occur to me that the college professor next to me might not want to hear my fourteen-year-old analysis of the newest Harry Potter movie. I did it anyway. My father brought me things and gave me advice about boys and threatened to break all the bones in my first boyfriend's body. I didn't mind.
When I was eighteen I went off to college. I had determined that I wanted to design clothes; so it was to New York, to a prestigious institute where I had won a scholarship because I was a prodigy. I doubted this and still do, but also appreciate the independence.
Now I am twenty. I go home every holiday and bring my boyfriends--or girlfriends--with me. Mother and Father just smile and pass around a tray of Mother's homemade truffles in the manner that an army sergeant passes an armed land mine. One day, they'll explode.
Challenge: Write a first-person account of someone's life. 300 words
(her name was apple.)
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