The Listener

Fresh start. New house. New school. New friends with luck. Max was seventeen. She really was hoping for a new start. They had moved into what her mother called "a quiet" village. What she really meant was a place in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do. So far they had seen a school, a small college, some kind of club, a small cinema and a few shops here and there.

The deliverymen had brought all their furniture to a small house on a nice estate. The house was made of brick, tall and identical to the rest. There were five houses to each side. When Max got out of the car to look at the place, she thought it wasn’t so bad. She wanted the biggest room and made it clear to her mother.

Max was tall for her age, about five feet ten inches, with light brown hair that grew down past her shoulders and brown eyes. She was neither thin nor fat. Her full name was Maxine Aidee Dunston and she hated it. It was Max or you would soon get on her bad side and that was very easy as she had a very short temper.

As Max and her mother climbed out of the car, she looked up at the house for the second time. A noise distracted her to see a couple of teenagers chasing each other at the very end house. Thank god she thought to herself as to actually think there would be other kids here apart from her. She walked up the front path made out of brick and a patch of grass to each side. She could also hear her mother muttering to herself about where she would put the flowers. Max sighed and quickened her pace.

She got up to the front door and waited for her mother to get out the keys. She leant on the door and it opened. She shrugged her shoulders.

"Mom, the door was open. I’m lookin’ around to see what this place is like." She walked in and was greeted with a small hall, which had the stairs in it, and gaps in the wall, which she guessed, were for doors but the people never got around to it. She made her way around the boxes and furniture that had just been dumped there carelessly by the moving men to get to the doorway at the back of the hall. As she went in she realised this was the kitchen as there was a fixed table in it with the sink and a fully furnished cupboard set, as well as the fridge-freezer and things that you would generally find in a kitchen. There were also boxes with the ‘kitchen’ written on them in her mother’s handwriting. She went through the doorway to the left and it was joined to the living room. The TV and sofa were there as well as, again, the room had a few pieces of furniture from the old house but a few new pieces here and there. Again, there were boxes also with ‘living room’ written on them. She went through the gap to her left which brought her back to the hall. She poked her around the corner of the gap, which led to the right, and she knew it was the dining room. She could see a gap going straight which took you into the kitchen again. A nice loop.