Mortified Mine

A/N: Well, it's good to be back, isn't it? I know, I know, it's been a while, and I'm sure that everyone I ever talked to is long gone at this point. But this idea won't leave me alone, I need to stretch my writing muscles, and I might as well share it with the world, right?

Chapter One: The Hellhole Sabbatical

Alice thinks her nose ring is infected.

"I'm sure it's fine," I coo into the phone, even though I know for sure that it's not fine. I steal a passing glance into the mirror at my own diamond stud, happy that I shelled out the cash to go to a professional tattoo and piercing

"It's definitely not fine."

"Well, what am I supposed to do about it?" Five minutes home and my room is absolutely trashed. Of course, it's not my fault that my favorite cropped jacket has gone M.I.A and the chances that either Katie or Lynn has stolen it are spiraling upwards by the minute. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that when June gets home tomorrow she's going to go into anaphylactic shock at the sight of the place.

"Comfort me! Come save me from this place!" Much like me, Alice is from a hellhole with a bat-shit family and absolutely no social stimulation. When you have a home life like mine, college isn't "second home." College is home, and summers are just unfair sabbaticals to remind us that life can never be dandy for extended periods of time. Unless we're talking the Golden Age of the Athenian Empire, and then pretty much anything is possible.

My prospective English and History majors assure me that no, really, nothing can be dandy for extended periods of time. Once college is over, I'm even more screwed than I am when it comes to enduring the summers.

"My dye job is fading."

"Ugh, Liz. I've gotten so used to our life together that I was just about to say, 'Yeah, don't worry about it, we can just do it again this afternoon.'"

"This is tragic."

"I know."

I suppose I'm making this out to be much worse than it actually is, but when the circle of people that you can stand dwindles from an entire campus of people to about six, on a good day, coming home can be slightly disappointing. Plus, I'm not going to play Positive Patty whilst talking to my ex-roommate about the end of our year. What kind of an impression would that give?

Also, if I ever started to play the role of Positive Patty I'm pretty sure all of my immediate acquaintances would die from the shock. Positive Patty (which I'm not even entirely sure if it's a thing) is more up my sister's alley. She's the pretty one, the nice one. I'm the harsh one with the attitude problem, but I suppose we balance each other out quite nicely. June has been my best friend since the beginning of time, for obvious reasons, and it's hard to deal with life without her. That's the one thing I'm looking forward to this summer, I suppose. Even though I'd call June twice a week, it's really not the same thing at all.

Hanging up on Alice with the excuse that I need to go yell at Lynn for stealing my favorite jacket, I flop down on my bed to stare at the ceiling. Faded green stars are stuck to the ceiling from the ill-fated fourth grade attempt of June and I (okay, mostly me) to recreate the solar system to gaze into every night before we fell asleep. I finger at my hair, admiring my split ends and the way my dark red lowlights are seeping away to reveal my natural blonde, feeling, just for a moment, like I've reached a calmness. Like maybe I am home.

"Elizabeth. Marie. Hooper!"

My mother's dulcet tones fly up the stairs like bullets and I roll over onto my stomach and suppress a groan. Ah, but no. Now I'm home.

"Why didn't you tell me you were here? I see a car in the driveway and bags all over the front hall, and perhaps we're being robbed, perhaps we have company, and I have nothing to entertain or welcome them, and then Katie comes and tells me it's you, and you didn't even come—"

"I'm sorry, Ma. I just wanted to get unpa—"

"Couldn't even say hello to your own mother! I see how it is. And look at you, lazing about like you don't have anything to do with yourself. College bills aren't going to pay themselves you know, Liz! What is it; do you not love me anymore? What have we ever done to you to wrong you?"

I blink a few times, trying to keep up with the course of thought.

Eight months at a prestigious liberal arts school keeping up with rigorous political and philosophical debate outside of class as well as in, and I still don't have any idea of what she's throwing at me. This means that she is either so super-intelligent that she should be working in a think tank with the likes of Stephen Hawking, or she is literally too stupid to string together actual sentences.

Judging by the fact that she barely made it out of high school and that her main occupation is now "trying to marry off her daughters in a pathetic attempt to re-grasp her youth", I'm going to go with the latter.

Meanwhile, she continues to prattle. "A phone call once a month, barely coming home for holidays, it's not like I'm expecting to see you around the house over the summer; it's as if I don't know you anymore, as if you don't like us!"

There's no use defending myself, either, because a) there's no stopping her once she's on a roll like this, she's like a steamroller, b) even if I do somehow manage to stop her, she'll pile all this resentment onto June instead, and she would not be able to take it, and c) it's not like what she's saying isn't true.

It's not that I don't love my family. I really do. It's just—

"Liz!" Katie bursts into the room, yelling my name so loudly that she shocks Mum into silence for about thirty seconds. Immediately, I solve the mystery of the missing jacket, as Katie's wearing it unabashedly as if she doesn't even remember that it's mine.

Well, to be fair here, she probably doesn't. "Liz, tell Lynn that when you left for college, you said that I was in charge of your closet and no one else could use your stuff without your permission!"

"I—"

"And your poor sisters—" Mom continues, getting back into drone mode.

"You never said that!" And Lynn bursts in; her arms full of clothes while she's half naked with her hair bleached one of the worst shades of platinum blonde I've ever had to endure looking at. "You never said that! Katie's lying, as usual, and—"

"I'm not a liar!"

"Yes you are!"

"Missing all sorts of things, and all I can think about is if you're dead or diseased or getting rape at this very moment at an awful party, all while you're getting a degree that's going to launch you into an unforgiving world that's not going to get you a job, and you're not even trying to find yourself a husband, and—"

"Have not!"

"You did that last March!"

"How do you know what I did last March?"

"Because you told me, you slutwit, and because I'm older I think obviously—"

"Blah blah blah, you're older, stop acting like that's some big accomplishment, Kate, no one honestly cares if you have one more year of life under your belt, it's not like you have anything to show for it—"

Katie, screaming something now unintelligible, rips a white silky top (mine), a necklace (definitely mine), and a pair of shoes (June's) out of Lynn's hands and storms from the room, their yells echoing throughout the house and Lynn chases her down the stairs. Then, more far off, I hear Carrie's voice join the fray: "WILL THE TWO OF YOU SHUT UP? I'M TRYING TO PRACTICE FOR THE STATEWI—"

"OH, NO ONE CARES ABOUT BEETHOVEN'S SIXTEENTH, OR WHATEVER IT IS, LEAVE US ALONE!"

"LEAVE ME ALONE!" And there's the sound of a slamming door to accompany it.

Mother has exhausted herself with her lecture, thank God, though I can't believe that she actually thought she'd be able to make herself heard over the dulcet tones of Lynn and Katie. Not that I'm complaining, but she could have conserved some energy if she had just shut up to let them have the floor when they were in the room.

The stairs creak, and my mom and I both look over to the doorway to see what else the house has in store for us. Whoever it is, Mum is severely displeased and leaves the room with an overdramatic sigh. Taking this as the sign that it could only be one person, I rush out after her to greet my father.

His hair is almost completely gray now, and his look of perpetual tiredness has at least tripled from last year when he had to live in the house without June. I hug him tightly, and he pats me absently on the head. "I'm glad you've come home, Elizabeth."

"I'm glad you're here to greet me," I reply, and he chuckles fondly, his eyes crinkling up with his smile.

"You've grown up."

"Just a little." Just a little drugs, alcohol, deflowering, political protests, imprisonment, casual sex, serious sex, etc. Nothing to worry about. Just a little growing up.

"You just missed Charlotte; she must have left within ten minutes of you getting home. She was hoping to be here to greet you."

"Oh, that's a shame, I've missed Charlotte." This is only partially true. Whilst at school, I didn't have much time to miss Charlotte. It's a sad truth. But now that I'm home, surrounded by the antics of my mother, Katie, Lynn, and Carrie for about a quarter of an hour, I miss Charlotte plenty. Even though she's two years younger than I am, she has more sense than everyone else in this house put together, except perhaps excluding my father—but that's a big 'perhaps.' Just because he's the most sensible person in the house doesn't necessarily imply that he's the most sensible person anywhere else. He's kind of socially retarded, my dad, which I don't blame him for when he's living in a house like this, but when a man spends 90% of his time locked up in a study reading books and working, then you have to acknowledge that maybe there is some kind of a small mental problem.

Katie and Lynn's voices echo back up the stairs, and dad expresses his joy by rolling his eyes to the heavens. "They're thinking about having a party for you, you know," he says, "The Wallaces."

I wrinkle my nose. "Gurgh," I say, "parties." In truth, I'm not opposed to parties as much as I'm opposed to what small town suburban America considers to be parties. AKA, mingling in lawns and living rooms and calling it social.

"You have another one to deal with, too, I'm afraid. Tomorrow, after June gets home."

"Why?"

"It's the annual thing, a barbeque, you know how it is. Supposed to be some sort of a welcome, though, there's new fodder moving into Netherfield Place for your mother to faun over."

"So she'll force us to go."

Dad taps me fondly on the head, messing up my bangs in a way that's not allowed to annoy me, as his daughter. "No," he smirks, "she'll force you to go."

"Dad!" But he just wanders further down the hall to his bedroom, inevitably to get another book to consume his time instead of having to spend it with the family. I turn and return to my room, deciding that it's time to put everything back in its proper spot so June has something welcome to return to. She'll be Mom's big prize at tomorrow's party, surely, because she's The Gorgeous One and Netherfield is home of the Ridiculously Rich. In other words, Netherfield is named such because it tickles my mother's nether regions, especially when her only joy is setting her daughters up on dates that are doomed to fail. Her life will be complete the moment she marries us off to rich boys, honestly. The sooner the better, too. The less education we get, the less she has to pay for.

I considered going to an all-women's school just to spite her, but chickened out at the last moment because the amount of casual sex I would have had at an all-girl's school would be far inferior to the flings and hook-ups I'm having now, and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Actually, I suppose technically 'now' is 'when I was at school.' Now I'm home and my hook up prospects have dropped to the unfortunate level of "zero", unless this Nether-kid turns out to be actually attractive (not likely) and attracted to me (even less likely).

I miss Tom and Sam and whatever that foreign exchange student's name was. They were constants in my life. Tom wasn't a very attractive constant, but still a constant, and he would at least buy me coffee whenever I woke up in his dorm room.

Of course, I had to resolve against talking to Tom ever again because I ended up using my sexual prowess for evil instead of good, so to speak, and that's never a good place to end up.

The sound of Katie and Lynn's yells flare up again ("THOSE SHOES ARE MINE!" "I BOUGHT THEM WITH JANE LAST DECEMBER, YOU LIAR!" "AS IF! YOU DON'T HAVE THAT KIND OF TASTE!" "THEY'RE MINE!" "MOTHER!"), and I firmly shut my door and crank my music to a level that makes my house remotely tolerable. I close my eyes, picture my dorm room, and open my phone to send a quick text to Alice.

Ah, it's good to be home.

I know, I know, but things are just getting started. Read on, fools, for next chapter we get a taste of Darcy, Bingley, Caroline, and June. And, as always, please send a review my way to let me know what you think.