So what if this town wasn’t perfect, who wanted perfect? Violet Brown flung herself onto her untidy bed. Polly, the most popular girl in school was perfect and BORING. Violet didn’t want to be like Polly or be in a place that thought it was as perfect as Polly. How would she ever survive? She’d have to be neat and tidy; she’d definitely have to brush her hair and even probably clean her shoes. She’d have to be Polly.

“Never!” she roared loud enough for her parents to hear, then scrambled in under the safety of her duvet.

So what if her Dad was offered the best job an optician could ever get? He said ‘it’s a job amongst jobs’. It was probably like the Oscars of opticians, if the Oscars was a job and not an award for acting. His exact words were ‘I’d be stupid, utterly stupid to turn it down’. This job meant so much to her Dad, other people’s parents always talked about how much they hated their jobs. It was confusing, adults and jobs. Why did they work if they hated it? Violet hated maths and she never worked at that. They seemed to love holidays and always wanted to be somewhere else so why didn’t they just do that? Why didn’t they go on holidays forever, surely they’d be happy then. Adults loved to complain but not her Dad.

Eugene, that’s what her Mam called him anytime he was in trouble, loved eyes. He just loved them. He said he married her Mam because she had the biggest eyes he’d ever seen, almost popped right out of her head sometimes. He loved being an optician. He left the house smiling every morning and always came home with a smile. He said because there were eyes everywhere he couldn’t help himself. He loved blue eyes the best which was great because Violets eyes were blue, but he also liked brown ones and green ones came third. Everyday he thought up new ways to improve eyes. He’d even won an award and had just been on the cover of “Eye Spy” magazine. Her Mam said the whole world was talking about it, or at least the part of the world that loved eyes too. She said his new bosses read about it in “Eye Spy” and searched him out.

She was proud of her Dad. She loved him more than a billion pounds. She was happy for him too, but being happy for him didn’t mean she was happy. She didn’t want the same things as her Dad. Her Mam would follow him ‘to the ends of the world’ as they were ‘hopelessly in love’. They said that so many times it made Violet cringe, other people’s parents didn’t talk like that.

But that was the thing with parents, they only ever did what they wanted and kids had to obey. Sometimes she wished she had brothers and sisters, then there’d be more on her side. She didn’t want the best job in the world, she just wanted to spend the rest of the summer playing up the fields with her friends. She’d barely have anytime to say goodbye either. Her Dad said they wanted him to start ‘asap’, that meant ‘really quickly’ because they were leaving on Sunday. Her Dad would start work Monday morning.

The town was called “Perfect”. She laughed. How could she ever live in a place called Perfect?. It couldn’t be perfect anyway, there had to be something wrong with it. Violet pulled back the duvet and walked to the window. She sat there in the fading evening light and well into the night plotting a way out of her problem. The more she thought the more her head hurt and she still hadn’t come up with a proper plan. She could run away but she was only ten and would need her parents for at least another two years, maybe three to be safe. She decided she’d sleep on the problem.

The next morning she woke with a smile. She had it. She wasn’t going to talk to her Dad at all, not just for a day or two, this plan was much bigger than that. She wouldn’t talk to him for as long as it took to change his mind. It was going to be hard but if she concentrated she could do it.

After all it was her Dad who told her she could be whatever she wanted to be. So that was the plan, she was going to be silent.