Alexandra Black had always been considered an average person. Anyone who knew her would be able to say the same thing with conviction. She was pretty, not beautiful, her eyes were bright but nevertheless an average and ordinary blue, framed by black lashes, set underneath brown eyebrows that needed minimal care. Her skin was a honey tan in the summer, pale white in the winter. She had everyday, run of the mill chestnut brown hair, cut short; when she had time to do something to it, it looked neat, when she didn't it turned into a shaggy mess. She was a regular height for a British teenage girl, hovering between five eight and nine. Her lips were well balanced, and a light pinkie red colour.
She was alright at sports, if a little clumsy at times, not being fully accustomed to hips and added cleavage (though it wasn't that much extra) even at seventeen. Puberty had been a shock.
She liked romance novels as any girl did, enjoyed all music that didn't scream at her and had lyrics, she disliked her homework, received okay marks in school, was fiercely independent from being an only child, occasionally grumbled over doing housework, and loathed being called anything except Alex.
Alex had never had any real ambitions, no true passions or goals in life, had never even been taught to have a drive for something. She floated through life wide eyed and clueless.
That's probably why, on March 28th when she stumbled through the front door of her parents London town house, she was baffled as to the appearance of three hold-alls, four satchels and a Sainsbury's 'for life' bag in the lobby.
Apparently her mother was leaving.
Her parents had always been rocky at best. Her mothers' pregnancy at nineteen had pushed the two into an unwanted marriage, and familiarity had kept it together. They had a routine, well learnt. Eat dinner. Watch TV. Send daughter to bed. Drink. Argue. Scream. Cry. Go to bed angry. Wake up angry. Go to work. Repeat. Easy.
Alex plonked down on a stool opposite her dad, slumped over the table wearing a grubby white towel dressing gown and staring pathetically into a cheese and pickle sandwich like it was taunting him with all the answers to his problems. She waited silently, expectantly.
Finally, almost ten minutes later his bright brown eyes looked up, not happy, nor sad, and his lips tugged into a crooked, relieved twitch marauding as a grin. "We're moving." was all he said.
It eventually came out that he had been offered a job. In America. It had been the cause of the argument, Catherine, Alex's mother, had not wanted to leave England, her home. Whereas Joseph, aka 'dad' had always wanted to go back, having been born and raised on an old Indian reservation called LaPush in the state of Washington. His – and her - family had descended from the original tribe of the Quileute's.
Her dad looked like a full blooded Indian. His skin was almost chocolate dark, his hair thick and shiny black in a plaited rope down his back, with dark brown eyes. Even at forty he looked good, young and healthy.
Alex had inherited little, if anything, from her dad, nothing physically except from one of his smiles; the shaky, half reluctant one that only just reached their eyes. But apart from that you couldn't see anything. Their personalities were identical though, teasing, playful, childish, at times confident, proud and fearless, others shy and unsure.