Rosie was in the blue room, talking to her closest confidante.

“Then when the lights went green he came right in front of our car on his skateboard and he was smiling at me, but he wasn’t watching where he was going and then he hit a bump and fell off and went arse over tit. It was sooooooooooo funny!”

“What is funny in a peculiar way is how in your life you might often find humor in the misfortunes of others,” he replied.

“Listen to this, it’s so good. We wrote it about this girl at school. My friend Melanie chucked a pear at her today so we call her Barbie Pearlegs because she’s blond and looks like a Barbie doll and the pear hit her in the legs and her legs are like pear-shaped somehow.”

Rosie recited the limerick that the girls had been teasing Barbie Pearlegs with all afternoon.

He smiled at the schoolyard humor and asked about ‘Barbie’ and what kinds of friends she was making at the school. He also learned how for a young teenager today it had become socially undesirable to be an early developer straight from the pages of a Mattell catalog.

The edges of Rosie’s lips turned downward slightly. “I can see Mom is unhappy at the moment. She works really hard and… I love her… and she’s put me in this school which is fantastic and so much better than my last one… but she isn’t happy. What can I do?”

“Sometimes it’s not a matter of doing. Sometimes you just need to understand. How would you feel if you were your Mom right now? She might be very happy to be able to have a roof over her head, and have you with her, and to be developing as a woman. Whatever else could be missing that might make her less than happy? Does it have much to do with you, Rosie?”

The questions echoed in Rosie’s mind for quite a few minutes, then her mother entered the room, and asked, as she had asked many times before:

“Who were you talking to, Dear?”

“No-one, Mom” came Rosie’s stock reply.

The next day was Valentine’s Day.

While Rosie was out at the shops, she got a Valentine’s Day card, and dropped in to a friend’s house quickly to have the card written and signed anonymously. Then she left the card in the letterbox at her house on her way back in.

Her mother seemed brightly happy all afternoon before they went out to a family gathering. While there, Rosie, who was a natural flirt with extraordinary charms, befriended a family guest, who happened to be her future stepfather, then introduced him to her mother. She came home and told him all about it.

i like it, very nice, spooky enough to make you want to know more.