Alana: My home

One of the biggest characteristics of Alana’s family was that when they love they love hard and the wrong person. Her grandmother loved her husband until he died of old age, no matter how many times he cheated on her. Her mother, Linda, had the innate ability to find the biggest loser around and date him until it finally reaches her brain that he might be wrong for her, it usually involved a kitchen fire. As for her older brother, Allan, he gets obsessed with girls, promising the moon for them, until he gets bored and moves on... followed by the girl’s psychosis making his life hell. The only one who has had a normal relationship so far was her dear aunt with her husband. This was her whole family on her maternal side.

She didn’t know much about her dad. He comes, he goes and comes again. Her other grandma was a chain smoker who doesn’t seem to like her as far as she’s concerned. She also had uncles and aunts on this side that she never got to see so, in her reality, she only had 4 people she loves in her life.

She was born and raised in a small town, in a small island on the Carebbean. With only 2,000 people around, chances are nobody outside of that place knows it exist. The streets were in great shape, for lack of use. Unlike other places with big malls and movie theaters, they had old buildings with need of paint, most of them abandoned. There was a clothing store, a supermarket, a small movie renting place, a post office and a music store, yet they had 6 drug stores.

You could say the town was the retire home of the country. There was a lack of children and people under 50 in general, most of them being on the outer part of the town. You could find them as long as you knew where to look. Where Alana lived, there were nine kids around her age, counting her brother. Her mother hated it because of this, but they got the house as a present from grandma and they couldn’t afford another place yet.


Alana didn’t mind the place. Her hobbies were: reading, writing, and hearing music through her headphones; all of them hobbies that don’t require other people. The house was in a quiet street and her neighbors were a nice old lady and an old lady with a pretty granddaughter, as her brother quickly pointed out when the morning they moved in.

But one perk of the place she lived was the public transportation system. Being 12 years old, you couldn’t just take a car and go somewhere so Alana and Allan would just use the public transportation system to go where they pleased. They had buses, small vans, taxis, ferris, and so forth. You named a means of transportation and Alana could show you where to find it in town, except planes and helicopters of course. Plus, most kids in town had a nice bike that could take them around. On the afternoon you could see most of the kids of the town running around in the boardwalk with a beautiful view of the sea and the capital of the country full of lights and music.

Eight-year-old Alana would usually go to the boardwalk and watch the setting sun with her brother and their mutual friend Daniel. This was against the rules, kids alone at night was not something their mothers approved of, but it was one of the few rules Alana didn’t always followed. It was such a quiet uneventful town that any feeling of danger seemed imaginary, even if the world wasn’t like that.

Also, Alana’s grandmother, at this stage of my life, had filled her with all sorts of stories from her youth. How many trees she climbed, how she dived into the sea, even once jumped off the ferry and swam back shore! She didn’t think I could do all of that, but going to the boardwalk was something her grandma enjoyed that Alana had come to appreciate too.