scene
The more time Violet spent in real estate, the less she cared about it. There was nothing passionate for her about setting people up with their so called dream homes, or showing them places that would inspire them. She wasn't sure when the interest had dwindled, exactly but it was a tangible reality. When Robert Dierden had come to her to sell his house, given her the keys and told her to show people around while he was out of town she took it as a vague instruction. The less she cared about the prospects of her job, the more she felt like Joanne the Scammer while she was wandering around Dierden's extremely out-of-date late 2000s decor. His staircase had a black painted metal bannister, for fuck's sake. His walls were muted peaches with that wash of white painted over top as was popular ten years ago. How was she supposed to sell Ryan Sheckler's exact decor from his MTV Cribs episode in 2009?

In the evening as the sun set she found herself at the house in a light faux-fur jacket and her bathing suit crammed in the bottom of her gym bag. Inviting Iggy over to verbally trash a house that inspired Holly Madison bedroom aesthetics was definitely a breach of conduct, and pretty illegal but for some reason Robert was a rich idiot without a surveillance system so Violet wasn't concerned. Even if he did have a surveillance system, she had to try to convince herself that it wouldn't bother her if they were caught. She waited before the hot tub had heated before inviting him over and instructed him to bring wine and park way out on the street so the neighbors wouldn't try to drag them for parking in the driveway. There wasn't much to do in the house while she waited, except for sing and enjoy the acoustics or shut herself up in the brown-tiled bathrooms and send Eli self gratuitous snaps.

When he finally arrived and she heard him at the door, she trotted over and flung it open with such enthusiasm that one could assume she just lived there.

"Welcome to my Caucasian home, Chip Stillwell." Violet greeted as she ushered him in with a flourish of her arm. "I hope you love textured walls."

"Hey, I want to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and say he purposefully designed it like this but the truth is he just never updated the place and we're all forced to look at his dubious choices," she told Eli and took the bottle of wine from his hands so she could shimmy off to the kitchen and leave it on the counter. Violet took Eli's hand and led him to a pair of mysterious doos with a button beside them, which she slammed her palm against and relished in the sound of the ding as something behind the doors moved.

"This home is a turn of the century masterpiece. You can live out all of your millennium dreams in here." The doors opened, and Violet grinned at him before pushing him into the elevator. There were stairs, of course but she used every excuse to hop in the elevator. "Don't worry, though. No one on this street still uses dial-up so you'll be able to access Just Jared or whatever ancient tabloid website you want if you decide to purchase this stunning property." The elevator ride was short, leaving Violet to let him out first, as was polite. There was something funny about taking an elevator up one and a half flights just for the luxury of it. It would almost make her angry if she hadn't had a drink before he'd arrived.

She led him down the hallway, past bedrooms with thick, awful curtains and a bathroom with offensively red tiles to her favorite room of the house. The master bedroom ensuite. "This is the best room," she explained as she opened the door and it was obvious why she thought so. A large golden cherub statue sat in the corner of the bath, and she had spent a long, long time trying to work out why anyone would want a naked baby watching them bathe. "Look at it. Have you ever seen something more pointless in your life? Do you want to buy this house yet?"

Violet scrunched her nose up at him, thinking about whacking him on the shoulder as a joke but decided against it, settling rather for a toss of her hair over her shoulder instead. Nothing said sass more than the classic hair toss. "I should have figured his name is Frank. He does give me a vague Danny Devito air." She replied, in the process of backing out of the bathroom. She could only look at the cherub for so long before she began to have a weird existential crisis about it.

"Oh, I bought this new head-to-toe swimsuit my mom recommended to me." As they made their way back downstairs via the elevator, she swiped her up her gym bag and dragged Iggy out to the backyard. It was a little chilly outside, but Violet had made sure the tub was heated and there was always the bonus that the area was enclosed to prevent neighborly snitching. "You get comfortable and I'll get changed and grab the wine."

She ran inside quickly, shedding the skin of Joanne the Scammer and slipping into the role of girl in simple black bikini who didn't care about swimwear as a fashion concept. Once satisfied, Violet produced a pair of wine glasses and balanced both bottles of wine in one arm to prevent the double trip before heading back outside. "I'm just kidding. Fuck the full-length swimsuits. Red or white?" Violet propped the glasses up on the side of the hot tub and held the bottles up, as if it facilitated decision making.

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narrative
Every year around the holiday season the church starts to bring out snacks and tea. It’s nothing special, but it’s the kind of thing that draws adults to it like they grew up with magnets in their hands and they spend so much time discussing their shrubbery life in the winter that children have difficulty maneuvering their way over. Donna’s older sister is consistently undeterred every year by the thriving adult population by the tea table and with hushed whispers under blankets at night she attempts to explain to her baby sisters that if the church didn’t want them to take a whole plate of cookies at once they wouldn’t put them out in the first place. Donna is typically disinterested in the cookies, she’s been lactose intolerant since she can remember but when you’re seven years old that feels like seventeen years. Besides, she had learned her lesson the hard way after trying to fist a handful of cookie dust into her mouth as a toddler, only to have it all slapped out of her hands by her sister.

At some point in the day the tea table for 1996 has cleared out, some woman with a high ponytail brought her baby into church to visit and Laura knows that adults care more about babies than they do about a pair of gangly girls in matching Peter Pan collar dresses, so she grabs Donna tightly by the wrist and pulls her over to the remaining offerings. Donna knows that schemes involving Laura often go awry, but she has been stuffing Christmas cookies into her pockets for two years running and she doesn’t want her sister to try and force her to eat grass in front of the neighbor boy again.

“I don’t know why I have to do this,” Donna whined, the panic of being caught settling in like a stone in her throat. She loved her sister, that much she knew but even she knew it wasn’t fair that she had to steal things that she couldn’t even enjoy. When she was five the rush was initially doing something that made Laura happy, but as she got older she began to realize that sometimes it paid off to be stingy with her.

“You have to do it because you’re younger than me.” Laura replied, her nose in the air and her blonde ponytail bobbing as she shook her head. Donna always had to do things because she was younger than Laura, but she felt like that was a copout of an excuse because she never made her other sisters do anything they didn’t want to. Still, she went along with it because she wanted to be the cool younger sister, the one that could be taken to Jessica McEwen’s pool parties and not be an embarrassment.

Donna stuffed handfuls of cookies in her pockets and groaned in dismay as her checkered Christmas dress gathered crumbs on the outside of the pockets, like her parents either loved her too much to stop her from eating or not enough to dust her off. Laura rolled her eyes and shook the crumbs off of her little, but not much smaller sister’s dress and pulled her away from the table quickly. The timing of the two sisters was miraculous, all it would have taken was a second longer for them to get caught and as their parents came to retrieve them alongside their other wayward, wild-haired daughters Donna truly felt as though she had conquered her tiny church once again.

It wasn’t until they got out of the parking lot that the plan began to unravel. Neither girl had thought to consider that the dress Donna was wearing had been circulating through Forsythe closets since 1992 and the pockets had begun to come away because Laura had been too caught up in the concept of getting away with another crime and Donna was too concerned with whether her sister really loved her or not. As soon as Donna stepped down the last step in front of the building, the pockets in her dress began to give way slowly, and then all at once. The first cookie rolled down the parking lot, and Donna's sisters cast her a wary glance.

"Huh, that's weird. Anybody else see that cookie?" Donna's dad asked as he stuffed his hands in his pockets for his keys and laughed like he knew he could make a joke out of it. Before he had the chance, the seams of Donna's own pockets ripped and every cookie she had managed to stuff into them came rolling out over the asphalt. Her face turned red and as if it wasn't dramatic enough to begin with, Holly and Zene's screams of excitement caused everyone walking back to their cars to turn around and stare in bemusement.

Her mother was the first to act, grabbing Donna by the hand and ordering the other girls to follow behind as they turned around and marched straight back into the church in order to make an example out of her in front of the younger two. "Donna Leigh Forsythe, I don't give a monkey's what your excuse is, I won't have no daughter of mine stealing cookies like some common rabble rouser." She didn't try to complain because she knew she had screwed up, but if the look on Laura's face was anything to go by she knew she'd be getting a dead arm in the back of the car on the way home.