The Valentinos

The Valentinos were quite a queer family, folks would say. Oh, very queer indeed. They were as queer as any family could be, you can be sure of that.

The Valentinos lived in quite a grand house, some would even call it a mansion, complete with a heated swimming pool that they never used (or at least that's what people thought). They were, needless to say, very rich and very, very queer. Nobody knew how the Valentinos got so rich and nobody sought to ask (they thought it quite rude). In the small town that they lived in everybody kept to themselves and didn't stick their noses or their opinions into other people's business, however queer and mysterious that other people's business might be.
It was quite a polite and boring town, to be honest. Nevertheless, that didn't stop the many curious glances passerby's directed at the house whenever they thought other people weren't watching (they were wrong, people were always watching).

They were quite right to stare though, the modern mansion like house looked quite out of place and forlorn among the neat row of Victorian bungalows that surrounded the house. To be honest, the house wasn't that strange if it was on any other road and not surrounded by a sea of Victorian bungalows. The house had smooth, carefully white washed and insulated walls and a polished, grey tiled roof, not to mention the exquisite work of art that people call a "garden" while its neighbor's rough coating of paint slowly peeled of into the tangle of plants that made up their "garden" or rather, forest will be a better word to describe their front yard (and the back yard). A neatly paved white concrete driveway led to an expensive looking polished silver car (nobody in the town knew what that car was, nobody had seen a car as expensive as that in the town). Next to the silver car was, the quite well known and famous swimming pool framed by a ring of lights that would sparkle brightly in the night. It was very well known in the town since it was always clean and not a speck of dust ever got into the sapphire blue waters and it was carefully maintained every single day along with the lawn and the garden by a gardener and a housekeeper. Again the gardener and the housekeeper were quite famous since nobody in the town had ever needed a housekeeper or a gardener in their whole lives, well the Valentinos were the exception. As if to prove that the Valentinos were the queerest family in town, the entire house was ringed off by a gate, and not any old gate either. It was made out of steel and closely interwoven and topped with razor spikes sharpened to daggers.

The inside of the house were more of a surprise to the simple lifestyle of the townsfolk then the outside could ever be. Replicas of Da Vinci and Picasso and a various other famous artists hung on the walls framed by gold and silver. A crystal chandelier, along with an array of other precious jewels dangled from the ceiling while the thick red carpet made out of velvet muffled any sounds that a clumsy person might make. There was a library filled with dust since nobody bothered to go in, a study for Mr Valentino, three vast bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, three bathrooms, two living rooms, an attic, and who knows how many spare bedrooms that were never used. In truth, the biggest house in town."Fit for the mayor", the towns folk would sigh as they passed the house (to them, the queen was a distant and faraway thing). Indeed, it was nearly fit for royalty except there were no guards, only a dozen highly advanced alarm systems but it was certainly better then the mayor's dwellings. Unfortunately, only the inhabitants themselves knew since nobody was very much invited to set foot inside the house for goodness knows how long and nobody wanted to. 

Now the inhabitants, the Valentinos were a entirely different story. Mr Valentino was a tall and thin and very forbidding man, with dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. People who knew him knew that he rarely smiled, he wore a permanent frown to match his perfectly tailored grey suit (rumor has that he never took it off) and so he seemed perfect for some politics and he was the most forbidding lawyer there was in the town. Children quelled at the sight of him and the stare he would sometimes give to people he disapproved of. He disapproved of anything silly and was the most serious person in town so it was an immense and surprising miracle that he and Mrs Valentino ever married.

Mrs Valentino was an entirely different matter. She had baby blonde hair and baby blue eyes and looked quite like a baby too, round and chubby and quite fat. Her personality was also quite like a baby and her all time favourite thing to say was,
"I was pretty once..." although if you took of all that roundness and added some maturity she wouldn't look to bad. She didn't work since you can't exactly call her diligent or organised or helpful or brave. You couldn't even call her creative.
But compared to Mr Valentino she was like an angel, always cheerful and pretty friendly. Anyway who needed to work when you've got a small mansion? She often said that she stayed home to take care to the children but really, all she did was eat, sleep, watch their big screen television and bake in the pool on hot days.
To say the least, both of the couple's life were very, very boring and so it was a colossal source of amazement when they had a girl, and then three years later, a boy.

Their two children, Ava and Leo looked like two children should be and were quite normal. Leo, who just had his ninth birthday had light brown hair and dark brown eyes. He was a pretty normal nine year old. Ava wasn't so normal. She had a weird combination of blonde hair, or yellow hair and light brown, nearly hazel eyes. She was shy, cold and very short.Although she was just about to have her twelfth birthday, she was as short as her brother. A thing that was the main joke in her school. To say the truth, she wasn't having a good time. She didn't like her wealth, not if it meant her classmates calling her ATM and shouting Ava The Midget into her face and to make it worse, she was a girl. And that meant she couldn't carry the sacred surname of Valentino to her descendants and unable to continue the family's line of work. She didn't mind to be ignored by her classmates but it was an entirely different matter to be ignored by her own parents and focusing on their beloved Leo.

She didn't like Leo much. He was smart and handsome and good at sport and nearly every girl in his class had a crush on him. Yeah, such an angel he was. He didn't talk to her much in school since it ruined his reputation or at least that's what Ava thought but he would often chatter and laugh at her which made her quite annoyed. Here, she was, three years older and being laughed at by your own little brother.
So she ignored him too. In fact, she was quite lonely.