As many of you know I love prompts and this particular one was set at a recent writing group meeting. The prompt was - Create a character and add something unusual.

Alice's World

Alice slumped into the chair, huffing and puffing. She didn't want to be here again - a therapist's office of all things, but her mother had been adamant and once mother says something its going to happen.

The waiting room is that sickly pale green of hospitals, a colour Alice knows only too well. Her early life was spent in a multitude of hospital beds, as she suffered one operation after another to correct her jaw. The resulting scars are ugly and obvious.

For anyone glancing at her they would have the impression of a typical teenager in ripped jeans, a graphic T-shirt with questionable words emblazoned on it and huge black ankle boots with metal heels. Her long black hair is what protects her from the ogling and the stares she endured on her younger life. She'd grown it as long as possible, so she could part it to one side to make it fall over her face like a veil. Of course, mother was always trying to persuade Alice to have it cut into a nice style - whatever that meant, but on this one thing Alice matched her mother's stubbornness and so far had won.

She huffed again, the therapist was late. Alice shifted through the magazines on a side table at the end of the row of grey plastic chairs. Boring stuff for gardeners, home décor and fishing, what the heck? She turned to her mother to ask if they could go, but at that precise second the therapist opened her door. She smiled and said with an abject apology,

"I'm so very sorry Mrs. Silvers, Alice, there was an accident on the freeway. Do come in Alice."

Alice's mother looked at the woman and accepted her apology, then gestured for Alice to go into the room she hated. All they talked about was her trauma over and over again. The same old questions and the same old answers in her mind at least. She never dared voice them though. She gave upbeat responses in the hope therapy would end.

How did she feel about the deformity? Stupid cow, how would you feel about it?

Was she making friends? No one wants to be friends with a freak - idiot!

How was your self confidence? Rock bottom.

Yap-yap-yap again and again.

Alice scuffed her boots on the grey carpet and slouched into the chair opposite her torturer. An hour's wasted space would past, but then she'd be free again for a month. Free to indulge in her favourite pastime trolling the internet and making other people's lives as unhappy as hers.