Summer. Finally, summer was in full swing, and the Upper East Side was at its best. It was one of Clemence's favourite pastimes, besides shopping, to go out in the day and just people watch. It was amusing to her to watch the people going past, funny how you could always pick out the tourists from the residents, struggling with their maps or their currency or even just the subtle differences in language if the visiors were British. Many a time she'd seen people stumped after asking for something they thought they recognised and being greeted with a blank look or something entirely different. And sometimes the antics of the real Upper East Siders were even funnier. Some of her neighbours were completely bizarre.

But today found her stretched out on a bench in the shade of a few trees, basking in the searing heat, phone in hand, ipod securely fixed in her ears, just thinking. And trying not to think at the same time. Funnily enough she was failing miserably. In my nightmare I feel so alive, In my dreamscape escapades, I make the grade I save the day... The lyrics blasted through her ears, blocking out the sounds of the rest of Central Park and for that she was almost glad. There was something soothing in listening to other people's conversations, other people's lives, especially when some of them could be so much worse than hers, but then it was terminally frustrating for her to listen without being able to jump in with comments or advice. She never did know when to shut up.

She had come out to the park to escape her family really. She'd woken up to realise that her brother had approriated her bathroom for reasons she couldn't fathom and he certainly wasn't giving, and by the time she'd managed to shove him out (no way was she using his bathroom!) her mother was calling her for breakfast. Family breakfast was a thing only carried out over the summer, when school and work commitments didn't get in the way, so it was sacrilege to miss it or be late, so she'd ended up landing at thre bottom of the stairs, still in her night clothes, deidedly less gracefully than she'd hoped to the smirks and disapproving looks of her siblings and parents respectively. A if her family could get any more annoying, it turned out, after a twenty minute ransack of her room, that her sister had made off with her new dress which she had in fact been wanting to wear, and it was now festering in some dark corner of Elizabeth's wardrobe. So she'd stormed out of the house in order that she might refrain from hitting someone.

Which found her lounging on her bench at ten in the morning, in her second choice outfit, made up her black nd red Balenciaga blazer and black mini skirt with her scarlet pumps and headband, otherwise known as the first things she could find in her wardrobe after the Elizabeth fiasco. Sitting and musing over the fact that she had heard nothing about any parties recently and how half her friends had run off somewhere for the summer.