The next assignment...setting!! So here it is. I'll actually slow the roll a smidge up here and post the mirror later this week since I have a bit more time to spread things out! Happy reading :)
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Stacy’s room was always a mess. That’s what her mom and Rosalyn thought anyways. Stacy thought it was just an elaborate way of organizing things. She knew where everything was. The clean clothes were on the side of her bed she didn’t use while the dirty were on the floor (accept for the path that leads from the door to her unmade bed). What bit of the carpet you could see Stacy cleaned it, or actually Hunter did for ten bucks when Stacy had the cash. It wasn’t that hard to do Hunter always thought, you’re in then you’re out but it was easy money.
Her homework and other important things, like Stacy’s Vogue magazines and the Entertainment Weekly with the cast of Harry Potter interviews inside, were layered on top of each other and covered the surface of the faux wood top of her desk. The papers thrown across the surface rushed down into the chair positioned in front of the desk. Stacy still needed to change the light bulb for her desk lamp, it had gone out last month. Her shoes were thrown in the mouth of her closet, mismatching and integrating with one another, her left gym sneaker being the only one not present. It was poking out from under her bed and some clothes as if exiled from Shoe Mountain that lived in the recess of her closet.
There was a shelf up top of the empty close rack in the closet where one box lived. Her box of keepsakes that Stacy had squirreled away when her mother insisted on donating some items when Stacy was thirteen. Gert lives up there. His green fur is flattened from the loved he received before Stacy put him away next to school pictures and an old diary from when she was ten. Next to the box were her old yearbooks ranging from elementary school when Stacy had crossed Jordan’s face out with a black sharpie because he tried to kiss her during recess to the fake sentimental notes from high school students that really had no intention on calling the Stacy over the summer break.
Some of Stacy’s dresser drawers were open to relive nothing but one sock, whose partner had long been taken hostage by the dryer, and an old, ratty t-shirt that she had snatched from her dad’s drawer one day when she had needed to paint the house with Hunter. Everything else had already escaped or been thrown out in haste to find something to wear when Stacy felt that there wasn’t anything at all.
But her room was warm and a sanctuary for Stacy when she felt the world around her was moving too fast. The colors rose in the east their strength in hue welcoming and inviting to new hopes and dreams. Her accomplishments hung in the west, the wall covered in captured memories and posters. This wall stood beside her bed being a constant reminder of who she was and that was good enough, people loved her for who she was, the faces full of white teeth and the edges filled with laughter was a constant reminder.
Her favorite pictures were near her head so when she rolled over she was awoken by their faces. There was one from the night Rosalyn, Georgie, and Stacy were playing in the backyard in mud puddles after the rain when they were younger, if Stacy looked real close she could make out tiny lights from the fireflies that decided to join them that night dancing around their streaked faces. Next to this one was one taken last month when Rosalyn finally got her braces removed. All three girls were latched onto one another grinning so big that Stacy would smile looking at it—Rosalyn’s teeth were finally straightened. There were more of Stacy with Rosalyn and Georgie and some of her family but one that stuck out was of her and grandparents, all four of them trying to hug her and Hunter’s small forms. It was the only picture she had where all four were still alive and together with her and her brother. Only Stacy’s nanny was still alive but was struggling with her failing age and body.
The one thing that was neat in the whole room was the bookcase that sat at the foot of her bed. The books lined up in order, alphabetized by the author’s last name. Their heights varied, moving over the literature landscape with valleys and mountains that grew in the confines of the oak shelves. A lone figure swam along the dusty levels of Stacy’s bookcase. It was the dolphin trinket box that Stacy’s nanny had given her when she came back from a visit to Greece. The light would reflect off of the aqua incrusted top keeping a pair of earrings safe in the depths of its stomach. A few scented candles were rooted in front of her Narnia Series and Jane Austen Collection. They lived here when Stacy didn’t transplant them to other areas of her room, burning them while exploring a new world through the eyes of heroes and heroines or just to get rid of the odor that she thought came from the piles of dirty clothes and shoes.
Stacy would sometimes clean, organizing everything so it was neat and tidy. Her clothes folded and put away properly, color coded, her shoes lined up in neat rows along the bottom of her closet allowing easy access in snatching a pair up in a hurry, and her desk would have papers stacked and pens put away instead of it being a large mess of recyclable materials. This would only last a week, then the drawers and closet would reject the order and explode the articles that were neat out into the open
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