postsecret #3 (I've been meaning to post this for a while now haha)

Things at the McGarren household were rough. Daddy McGarren had been long gone, and Mommy McGarren was working three jobs. Robby McGarren had gotten busted for drugs and was currently somewhere in Utah. Young Norah McGarren was the youngest in the family and the only person, in her immediate and extended families, with a shot at doing something great. Her gap-toothed smile and cropped chocolate brown hair made her downright adorable. From a young age, she discovered that she could influence anyone to do anything she wanted. Nobody could pass up a little girl with a gap between her two front teeth who would wear her girl scout sash, laden with patches, everywhere she went.
Years had passed since then, and little Norah McGarren grew up, with the help of a scholarship graduated from college, and got married to a nice man called Joshua Thompson, much to the delight of her older relatives. She had two wonderful children, a son named Teddy and a daughter named Melinda, who were the same distance in age as Norah and her brother Robby were. She dyed her hair bleach blond and paid for her own orthodontics once she reached college and got her first paycheck. Little Norah McGarren was gone. The woman who took her place was almost unrecognizable.
Melinda was nine-years-old and in the fourth grade, a dedicated girl scout. Her sash was heavy with patches like her mothers was, only there were much more of them. She had been her troops top seller of cookies ever since her first year of Daisy scouts. Everyone assumed that this was due to the fact that Norah Thompson had insisted on being the troops cookie mom every year. Since none of the other mothers possessed the same kind of enthusiasm as she did and didn't have the energy to try to compete with her, Mrs. Thompson always got the job.
Of course, no one really knew Mrs. Thompson's motives. She appeared to be nothing but passionate for the girl scouts, but in reality, it was all about gaining her own personal wealth. She figured that because she grew up poor, she had every right to try to collect as much money as she could for herself, even if the only way to go about that was by fraud. The second Saturday morning in January of every year, the day that the cookie-selling madness annually began, Mrs. Thompson would load Melinda and her cookie-selling sheet into the back of her suburban and head out around the neighborhood. She charged four dollars a box instead of the typical three dollars and twenty five cents. When customers questioned, she blamed it on the economy and looked at her daughter with concern. The people believed that sort of thing and bought an extra box or two, feeling sorry for the mother and daughter who were "going through financial hardships due to the economy."
Subsequently, Norah and Melinda Thompson became the nations cookie-selling champions. Three dollars and twenty five cents went to each box of cookies, and seventy five cents went towards the Norah Thompson Fund. Considering the amount of cookies they sold, it added up. Soon Melinda was seen sporting considerably more patches and Norah had a new Coach purse slung over her shoulder at meetings. As far as the troop mothers knew, the yearly gain in funds of the Thompson household was attributed to a raise in Mr. Thompson's salary. Nobody knew of the fraud but Norah and Melinda, who was grown up enough to realize that her mother was charging more than the cookies worth. But she had sworn to secrecy at the will of her mother, and was just happy to get more patches, for goodness sakes.
It wasn't until Melinda was a senior girl scout that she decided to turn her mother in. Nobody wanted to be forced to wear a sash in high school and nobody wanted a criminal for a mother. It just wasn't right. On the last day of her tenth grade year, Melinda Thompson threw her sash in the firepit and marched up the police station steps.

PostSecret

By the way, I'm working on another PostSecret now, but I think it's going to take a while to write. I'm going to the mall and to He's Just Not That Into You, so be patient. :)