The Happy Place

In a not-so-distant future, a teenage girl is addicted to virtual-reality wish-fulfillment.

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Bellatrix Swain gritted her teeth as she sprinted through the rain, hunched over and trying to keep her textbooks dry by pressing them to her chest. She reached her door, and shifted her books to one arm while she used her free hand to operate the fingerprint scanner.

"Scanning. Please wait," a computerized monotone said, with infuriating slowness. "Access granted. Welcome, Miss Swain."

The door slid open. Bellatrix ran inside, dumped her things on the floor, took off her raincoat, and tried to hang it up properly but ended up dumping it on the floor too. She raced towards the staircase.

"Where are you going?" her father yelled from the kitchen. "And what's the hurry?"

"Uh, my room. VR stuff."

"Do your homework first."

"I finished it all at school," she lied.

"Okay, then. Have fun."

She ran to her room, locked the door, and breathed a sigh of relief. Then she carefully unpacked her virtual reality suit from the box under the bed. She changed into the virtual reality clothes, a complex process that took at least ten minutes. "Okay, Edward. Here I come," she muttered to herself as she stepped onto the omnidirectional treadmill and flipped the visor down over her eyes.

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Everything was better in her virtual world, really. In the real world, she was an average girl. Not particularly pretty, popular, smart, funny, or any other compliment you can think of. But here in this world, she was beautiful, charming, everything she had wished for. Even her name was better here. Bellatrix Swain hated her name, so she remade herself under the name 'Isabella Marie Swan,' Bella for short. In real life, Bella was just another girl in the sea of faces, who longed to be noticed but never was. But here, everyone just seemed to love her more. Sure, she had a few enemies, because the occasional conflict made things more exciting. But almost everyone wanted to be her friend, and everyone treated her as incredibly important. Well, technically she was important, because the entire virtual world only existed because it was her fantasy land. It was perfect, but the best part of all was Edward. Bella had never had a boyfriend in the real world. She was just too normal to be noticed very often. Here she had a virtual boy just waiting for her, every day after school. And he wasn't just a regular boy, either. He also had superhuman strength and speed, could read minds, possessed incredibly good looks, and was a vampire. (Bella thought that, as long as she was making this up anyway, she might as well make her fantasy boyfriend extra-special.) And Bella was madly in love with Edward.

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AN: Hey guys, how'd you like it? Personally, I thought the last sentence was a bit weak. I'll try to get the chapters in which stuff actually happens typed out soon. But I'm going on vacation in Australia in a few days, so perhaps not. Bear with me, please. Oh, and today's vocabulary term is 'omnidirectional treadmill' :P