Vocabularily Adventurous

I never told my mom that I only spent $127 on textbooks this semester, even though on some level she would have been happy to hear it. My mom had brought me up to shop for bargains, choose the product with the highest quality at the lowest cost. If she had known how frugal I had been, her face would have had such a proud look--I'd have smiled, and she'd have congratulated me. Her smile, though, would have been a little stretched. Like her budget, I guess.

She started growin...

Brooke wrote to her mother, finished her French assignment, tidied her desk, folded the laundry she did last week, swore off potato chips, and made a long list of New Year's resolutions that she fully intended to keep this time. Normally she was only half as productive, usually less. But she vowed never to let anything go by the wayside, always to keep her promises, and never to doubt again, filled with something like ecstasy because Aaron had kissed her.

That is, she imagined he had...

Valérie was at the mirror again. I had always thought one's skin tone was one of those characteristics you just can't change, but her tan was peeling off at an alarming rate and without the tropical sun of her home, she'd soon look just like me: average.

She scrutinized her glowing, exotic skin, rubbing her fingers over her cheeks and forehead to smooth the flakiness that resulted from her sudden plunge into winter.

"C'est trop sec," she complai...

Each white button slipped out of its respective embroidered slit without much resistance, and after withdrawing her arms from the long sleeves, she let the blouse fall unceremoniously into a pool on the tiled floor. She stepped out of her khaki trousers and silently removed the matching lace undergarments, followed by her nude knee-high stockings. Gazing at herself in the medicine cabinet's mirror, she unclasped the barrette at the back of her head, her hair tumbling over her shoulders...

The first snow is always the best. Even when things aren't going your way, you take a walk in the first snow and you're okay. It's therapeutic.

There's something exciting in knowing that you've made the first footprints in the snow on your driveway. And there's something thrilling in walking down the white sidewalk, knowing that that mulberry tree on the end of the street was the same one that your cousin fell out of one summer long ago. Now the tree is covered completely in s...

The moon was undoubtedly out, it being nearly midnight, but if anyone had been on the street they wouldn't have been able to tell. The old wooden houses on each side of the road had not been built well or with any thought to the problems that could occur in the future. The "street," if one could call it that, was only about ten feet wide at its widest, and the wind and wear had persuaded the buildings to lean towards each other, creati...