Eden High: Series 1 (Eden High 1-6)

“Give it up old man.” He grinned as he pulled me up from my seat and led me up to my room, where mom was standing in the middle of the room acting as giddy as a high school kid herself.

It wouldn’t be the first time these two planned a blitz attack. Mom and dad had had my brother dad’s first year in college, when he was still eighteen and mom was seventeen.

Her virginity was supposed to be a going away present for her boyfriend, who had waited two whole years for his love to get older and the two dorks had got caught their first time out.

Of course they only shared part of the story with us kids, but grandma Rose filled in the rest. Grandma Rose is dad’s mom who lives in England, but she’s a whole other story.

Long story short, our grandparents worked out a deal where dad got to stay in school, mom got to finish high school, while they took care of Jared, that’s the dweeb’s name.

I don’t think they were expecting me to follow a little less than a year later though, but everything had worked out in the end.

As was evident by our grand home and the luxury cars both my brother and I had been given for our sixteenth birthdays respectively.

Anyway, the fact that they had us at such young ages meant that even with the help of their parents, they never really got to have a true teen life, so of course they still acted like two goofs around us kids. We love it.

“What are you two up to?” I looked from one to the other. I could hear my kid sister in her room with her Disney music on blast. My brother was out with his deadbeat friends, probably getting in his last goodbyes before we went off into the ether.

Mom stepped away from where she’d been blocking my view of the bed and I almost hyperventilated when I saw the large orange box there. “Mom, don’t play, is that…?”

“Come on open it and see.” I rushed forward and started ripping the brown ribbon from around the box; my heart was racing. This was almost as good as a car. My first Hermes bag; this was like hitting the jackpot for a girl like me.

“And my favorite color too, mom how did you pull it off? I thought you said I had to wait until I was eighteen and that it wouldn’t be possible…” I started rambling in my excitement. I’d been begging for one of these luxury bags since I was fifteen, with no luck.

Mom had a closet full of them, it was some kind of secret thing between her and dad, and whenever he went away somewhere for any length of time, he’d come home with one of these orange boxes for mom.

She’d get this sappy look on her face and the two of them would whisper and suck face forever until one of us kids threatened to hose them down. I somehow got into the habit of associating that bright orange box with love and romance and I’ve been dying for one of my own since forever.

Of course I knew now that the dang things cost as much as some cars so I hadn’t fussed too much when I was shot down for the past two years or so. But now! woot.

Dang I am going to be styling like a diva when we land. It’s probably really tacky, but that little bag made the move worth it. What can I say? I’m easy.

Wow, the new house looked like one of those McMansion things they were always talking about on the news.

It was ginormous and the grounds looked like my grandma’s place in England.

Us three kids ran hell-bent for leather towards the front door, already fighting over which rooms we wanted. I wasn’t too worried though I know their taste.

Jared will want something in the attic so he can pretend that he’s living alone in a bachelor pad, so he can have whatever brainless friends he makes come over and talk about stupid football.

Maggie will want the room closest to mom and dad because at eight, she was still very much the baby of the family. And that left every other room inside this beauty up for grabs.

I ended up with a room overlooking the gardens with a magnificent view of the mountains off in the distance. I felt my first real burst of excitement and spun around hugging myself.

Of course the first thing I did was break out the phone to take snapshots and send them off to my girls back home.

There was a tinge of sadness when I was finished doing that, but I squashed it before it could bring me down again. Dad had promised that we could go back to visit sometimes so I would hold onto that.

For the next couple of days there was a flurry of unpacking and finding things, losing things, panicking because we thought we’d left something that we just couldn’t live without behind.

We dropped into bed at the end of each night exhausted. Dad was pretty excited about his new office and the new people he would be working with, and mom was playing social hostess to all the housewives who kept dropping by with welcome baskets.

I had yet to see anyone my age and my brother was already tearing at his chains, he can’t go too long without playing with pigskin.

Mom had set up salon visits for us for the Saturday before school started. I flirted with the idea of cutting my hair but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Mom had never got my hair cut, not once. She was an old hippie throwback I guess, so I wore my honey blonde hair straight down my back to the top of my ass.

I got lots of compliments on it wherever we went, and the truth is, I really loved it and was proud of the fact that it had never been touched.