Every morning Violet’s neighbour does scream therapy in his shower. When they first moved in it would wake her up really early and it annoyed the hell out of her.

The house was over a hundred years old and looked like it was about to fall down. The faded paint was peeling off the walls, all the floorboards creaked so you couldn’t sneak around anywhere and it smelt like dirt.

The backyard wasn’t any better. There was no green grass and there was a dilapidated swing in the middle of the yard that gave you splinters.

On their first night there Violet had to share a room with her little brother Mickey. Violet wouldn’t have known she even had slept if she wasn’t woken by Joseph Jolly the next morning. But now Violet uses it as a sort of alarm clock to get ready for school.

Joseph Jolly would always be in his shower at 6.00am sharp everyday. He would go for a full 20 minutes in there. Her mother doesn’t think it as useful as she did though and her father went over to Joseph Jolly within the first week in their new house to ask how come he would get murdered in the morning but still be alive the next day.

He said that if Peter has a problem with his scream therapy he would have to talk to his physiatrist in the city which Father, of course wouldn’t do.

“I don’t like the people who live in the big cities.” He said to Violet when she asked why he didn’t like the city. She thought it was kinda stupid because how could he dislike people he hadn’t met yet? So Joseph Jolly still has scream therapy in his shower every morning.

This morning, while we were eating breakfast, Mum stated that they had all been very harsh on Joseph Jolly.
“We?” Violet thought, raising her eyebrows and looking straight at Mickey. He turned and looked at her and poked his tongue out.

"Violet, Mickey, Peter.” She looked at each of them in turn. “You all know what I am talking about so I have arranged for Mr Jolly to come round our house tonight for dinner. We have finished renovating the house so it should be very nice…”

They all groaned. Violet shut her eyes and laid her head back onto the backrest of the dining chair, thinking how much this was going to suck. In the back of her mind she felt a little bit of pity for Joseph Jolly because he didn’t like anyone of us either and for him there were four people to contend with while for us it was only one.

But the feeling passed almost instantly when she realised that they were going to have to be nice to him, while he wouldn’t care about what he said or did while in our house.

“After all,” she thought, “We were the ones threw an egg through his shower window while he was having his ‘therapy.’ Alright, I was the one to throw an egg through his shower window. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t know it was me.”
Violet opened her mouth to let out a sigh when,













GLOP!
A spoonful of wet yogurt hit her between her mouth and her nose.

Violet’s eyes shot open and she looked straight at Mickey. He was laughing really hard but trying to keep it in. He pointed at Father. Violet turned to him and saw the comical expression of his face.

He had a very guilty look on his face but in his hand was a yogurt covered spoon he was trying to hide under his armpit. But then he relaxed when he saw Violet laughing and thought he was off the hook when Mother came over and smacked him on the back on the head.

“Peter! I can’t believe what you just did! Apologize to your daughter right now! You better not behave like this when Mr Jolly comes over…” Mother said, talking to Father like he was one of the children.

While everybody was distracted Violet got up and put her dish into the sink and wiped her mouth on a piece of paper towel. Looking down she noticed her pyjamas had yogurt dripping down them so she wiped that off as well.

“…We need you to be a model father Peter, and that definitely does not mean throwing yogurt at people.” Mum was still ranting. She could go for hours. One time Mickey tried to cook marshmallows using his lamp in his bedroom and made his room smell like burnt marshmallows for a week. Mum lectured him for 2 full hours then went and had dinner and acted like it hadn’t happened. Mickey was left standing there, confused.

“…Do you realize that Mr Jolly will tell people if you did that while he is here? We don’t need that kind of publicity when we have just moved in. We will be known as ‘The Family who Throws Yogurt.”

She used hand gestures to act like it was a headline while Father got up and put his dish in the sink. He walked over the coat hangers and shrugged on his jacket.

“I’ll see you lot this afternoon,” he said and gave Jo Anne a kiss on the cheek then walked out the door to work. Violet’s mother was left standing there with her hands on her hips and her bottom lip pulled out in a pout.