This is a story that I wrote ages ago, but while i was searching through old files, I thought I might try to finish it. It came from a conversation with someone about how everyone is prejudice in a way, how no matter how free-thinking you are, it's still there, lurking below the surface.

Here's the prologue and the first two chapters. Please review and let me know if anyone is interested in me continuing it.

Enjoy!

This story, like so many others, begins very simply with a street. Masterfield Street, to be exact. On this street, there were two houses, number 4985 and 4987. Both of these large houses were located at the very end of the winding road, blocked from each other and the sidewalk from large boxed hedges. At first glance, both homes were very alike: large, square, three-story Colonial boxes with neat shutters at every window, painted to match the hunter green trim. This story begins just after five o’clock in the evening on September the fourteenth, 2007. As such, the curtains were drawn in the front facing windows of these houses. With the exception of two windows anyway: the one of the far right front of 4985 and the one on the far left front of 4987. It is beyond these two windows where are story begins, where the first of the sundry differences will be found.

In her front-left corner bedroom, beyond long curtains tie-dyed black and red, embroidered with silver dragons, Belladonna Coldcrow was struggling over her physics homework. With a groan and a muttered oath, Bells slammed her textbook and pushed it to the floor before dropping her head onto her arms. What the hell did she care about Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics? Bells hated science, she always had. English and History were her passions academically, but in general, she just wasn’t interested in much beyond reading, drawing, listening to music, and watching movies.

She sat up and glanced around her room. The curtains for both windows were open, one showing the street and the city that lay beyond the hills of her neighbourhood, the other showing the house next door and the window into another bedroom, another world Bells never wanted to be around. Getting to her feet, Bells kicked a stack of Daredevil comics out of her way and went to the window facing the neighbours. Before she closed the curtains, she said a quiet blessing for the girl across the side yard. No matter how bad things were here, Bells knew that next door, everything was far worse.

The other room was a different as was possible from Belladonna’s room. The curtains here were off-white with a faded floral pattern along the bottom. Where Bells’s room was a riot of color and always messy, this room was plain and perfectly ordered. In this room lived Esther Owens. Currently, Esther was sitting primly on the faded rag rug in the center of her floor putting the finishing touches on an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets 1-7. After a moment, she sighed and pushed her notebook away. Esther really did not know why she bothered even doing the homework for her English class, the teacher hated her. Not that Esther blamed the woman: she knew it had to be hard to teach someone with no imagination.

No imagination, that’s for sure, she thought, getting to her feet and glancing around the room. As always, her eyes rested on the curtains of the room across from hers. Light was shining through the wild fabric and Esther could faintly hear rock music playing on the night air. Biting her lip, Esther forced herself to look away. There was nothing but evil to be found in the house next door, her parents had made sure they all knew it. Shrugging off her strange mood, Esther went over to her closet and began searching through her clothes for something to wear downstairs for dinner. As Esther pulled a long beige skirt and matching sweater-set off their hangers, she couldn’t keep her mind from wandering across the divide into Belladonna’s room. Maybe the whole family were agents of Satan, but how could they do anything worse than what happened here?

Continue to the next chapter please :)