Author's Note: I was writing for something totally different, and this idea came to me. This is just the first portion of what I believe will be three or so parts, and I hope you guys enjoy it.
Diane Chambers' first grown-up decision was made in aisle five of the hardware store. She had spent nearly an hour pawing through paint color cards shaded in vivid purples, pinks, and blues before landing on one in particular that appealed to her elementary school tastes.
"This one!" five-year-old Diane Chambers proclaimed, planting her little feet authoritively. She handed a color card to her family's butler, Boggs, who was in charge of helping the girl pick out a new wall color for her bedroom. Boggs stared down at the garish shade of plum and sighed. Her mother won't be happy, but at least it's what the girl wants, he thought.
"Perfect choice, Miss Chambers," he droned.
They left the store with four gallon cans of plum paint, and upon returning back to the Chambers' residence, Boggs discovered that his assumption was correct.
"Plum? But plum is so... ordinary, dear," Helen Chambers explained to her daughter. "It's completely without nuance."
"Without... nuance?" Diane questioned, confused with her limited vocabulary.
"Yes, dear. You'll notice it when your entire room is painted with... this."
Still, somehow Boggs ended up clearing out what seemed like truckloads of the girl's stuffed animals, books, and other belongings to paint the room. When it was all done, Diane skipped in to assess the handiwork, an ice cream cone melting down her tiny fist. She stared at the wall quizzically for a moment, then let out a sigh.
"Mother was right," she began. "Plum is completely without nuance."
With that, she sashayed back down the hallway. That day, Diane decided that making grown-up decisions wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
The shouts of Helen and Spencer Chambers echoed through the walls of the Chambers' large estate. Diane, who was now twelve, wiped tears from her eyes as she sat solemnly on the edge of her bed. She stared down at the gray and white kitten beside her, and took a closer look at the heart-shaped charm dangling from the cat's collar.
"Dearest Diane: Happy Birthday," it read. She turned it over to the other side and saw, "With love, Mother and Father."
"You don't want this on you anyway, do you, Elizabeth?" Diane asked the cat. She undid the buckle, and slipped the collar from around her neck, quickly tossing it into a nearby desk drawer. Elizabeth purred in approval.
"See? We don't need that, do we?"
She snuggled the kitten closer, tears still staining her cheeks.
"Do we?" she repeated. Elizabeth replied with a slight mew.
"You're the only one that matters to me," she told the kitten. "I wouldn't be here without you."
Diane eyed the crumpled-up piece of paper that still sat on her desk. It was a note to her parents that she had written the night before, one that they would only come to find after she was long gone. For a fleeting moment, she thought that those words would mean something, but now they seemed so juvenile, even though she was only a girl aged twelve.
It was a new day, she decided, and with Elizabeth at her side, she didn't need anyone else.
How she ended up losing her virginity on a fold-out futon inside her parent's garage, she'll never know.
Helen Chambers had banished her daughter's first piece of dorm furniture to a permanent home in the garage over the summer before Diane headed off to the dorms of Bennington University, and the sound-proofed walls made for a quiet retreat for Diane and her boyfriend to finally do the deed.
The boy - a handsome, dark-haired young man with a smile that made her weak at the knees - had a thought to bring candles, a decision that Diane found appealing and very romantic. She lit them one by one, and placed them on the cement floor, as well as on top of a stack of storage boxes that contained some sort of Christmas decorum.
He wrapped his strong arms around her waist and nuzzled her neck from behind.
"Are you sure you're ready for this?" he asked, flicking off the overhead light. She just nodded in reply, as she began to slide the straps of her dress down her shoulders. They shrugged off the rest of their clothes and began their foreplay under a bed sheet that Diane had dug out of storage.
The act itself was nothing special, really, and didn't live up to Diane's expectations that she had read about in books and poetry. The futon beneath them creaked with every move they made, and the sounds emitted from either one of them were admittedly anything but erotic. A wooden shelf above the futon held another lit candle, which tipped over during the action and dripped scalding hot wax onto the back of the futon, soon hardening into a hard puddle.
When the futon was later hauled off the truck on college move-in day, it was Helen, of course, to point out the mysterious blotches.
"See? I told you this thing was tacky! It's already stained!" she cried in disgust. "I don't even want to know what those are from!"
All that Diane could do was blush a deep shade of crimson.
While Diane readied herself for her first semester at Bennington College in Vermont, her summer fling prepared to head overseas in the army. She couldn't stand to look at him in that gaudy green uniform, but the final straw occurred when his dark curls of hair were shorn away by some Army captain, and in turn formed into a hideous crew-cut.
Their last date happened to be at the last go-to event of the summer: the fair. He insisted on buying her a bundle of cotton candy and tickets for the rides, and by the end of the night he had won her an adorable teddy bear from a carnival ring-toss game.
She didn't have the heart to tell him that night that she found his new haircut and lifestyle repulsive, as shallow as it seemed. Instead, she went home and placed the teddy bear on a shelf in her closet to get it out of her sight. She also tossed the slip of paper with his mailing address in the trashcan beside her vanity, into the abyss of things never to be seen again, and cracked open one of her purchased college textbooks to preoccupy her mind with her pre-law studies.
It wasn't always effective, but that night, Diane soon learned that binge-eating cotton candy was also one hell of a breakup remedy.
Author's Note: It has been a little while since I've written anything Cheers related, and it has also been an unusually long time since I've watched any episodes, so I fact-checked some things with my Cheers "Bible," Cheers: The Official Scrapbook. The book claims that Diane attended Bennington University, which by a quick Google search appears to be in Vermont, so that's where that came from. For the life of me, I couldn't remember the specific university mentioned in the series, but oh well. This author's note is getting unruly, so I'll shut up for now. :) Let me know what you think of this so far.