"Miss Beauregarde, I would-"
Slam!
Having just risen from the couch, I shut the window closed and took a moment to have this sink in: there were reporters waiting to take an interview from me outside the windows.
I had been living with reporters for a week by now. They were very insistent on keeping track of every aspect of my life since winning the ticket, not even allowing me - or my mother - out. As I took a deep breath of not-terribly-fresh air, I accidentally walked into the Wonka bar box where I had found the ticket.
We with my mother were literally reduced to drinking tap water and eating Wonka bars.
I was aware of the damage. If I ate too much of the stuff a day and didn't do exercises at home (after all, I didn't leave my house) (Author's idiotisms: I suppose that makes her... homestuck. BUH DUM TSS) I will appear in the tour even fatter than the epitome of fatness Augustus Gloop. Not a very good first impression for the ultimate winner. But, alas, I had to survive somehow.
Oh, and here's the icing on the cake: whenever I peeked into the news reports that were spreading around the world, approximately half of them spelled my name as "Violet Beauregard". Even though they could just take note of it by taking one of my trophies, like Jane Crocker... Janet Roberts did. It bothered me when I was still back in Lithuania and it bothers me now.
Walking back to the room that first appeared on television when the world saw my face, being completely bored and at a loss of things to do to entertain myself, let alone the reporters, I suddenly noticed the voice of my mother, who had been preparing for our trip the whole time, using the primitive excuse for the Internet and never letting me near it because I'm supposed to be a winner unmoved by such ludicrous distractions.
"Violet, we're going. Now."
We both then dressed in identical (minus the size issue) winter jackets and my mother showed me that at least one of the windows wasn't surrounded by reporters and we could safely escape. We were both unmoved by the "guys toracking every aspect of my life" bullshit as we got into the car to get to the airport.
But then I saw something else.
Sitting in the back seat, I very clearly saw a girl about my age across me and a distressed therapist about to take a long flight. It was almost as if my stories were unraveling before me.
"Hello, Violet!"
'Sup... Irene Hurricane.
The vision quickly faded, though, as I stepped into the airport's building and immediately noticed a tabloid on sale, proclaiming that the fifth and last Golden Ticket had been found by a Russian boy named Sergey Kulchyakov.
In the photos, he was as much of a smiler as I was and I could see the Russian church in Moscow in the background, but then I read the article itself and... St Petersburg? Что?
Oh, and at the bottom of the article there were the mugshots of us four, as if we were a separate horribly misinterpreted group: August Gloop, Verruca Salt, Mike Teevee... and Violet Beauregard, of course.
I put the newspaper back where it belongs (in the counter, never to be bought by anyone), and, after finding my mother among more journalists, we both stepped through security and into the airplane to Canada.
Author's idiotisms: My best solution to the "is Wonka's factory in the US or England" dilemma. In the second novel the main characters saw North America beneath them, but no one ever said that North America equals the US.