Purple sneakers

Round 27: Autumn 2025

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Emil Collins is 53, Anna is 47, Nathan is 15 and Hope is 14.
(Tessa is 16, Dominic and Malcolm are both 15 and Julia is 14)

Narrated by Nathan Collins

It's a little strange in the house since Grandpa died. Quieter, I guess. Dad, especially. I'm usually the only quiet one in this house but Dad has been pretty down.


We haven't had any shortage of visitors though.

Dad has been wanting to spend a lot of time with his brothers and sisters, so there seem to always be family members over.

After Dad, I think Hope is missing Grandpa the most.

For the last few years, she and Grandpa were working really hard on the vegetable patch he started, so she's trying to keep that going. If we're at home, she's usually out there.

So because I know she's in kind of a funk, I'm trying to be nice to her.

She's occasionally okay but she really makes it hard to like her sometimes!

Hope just has such a sense of entitlement! I've got my licence now and she thinks that makes me her personal chauffeur.

And Mum takes her side and tells me I have to take her. It's even worse because Hope is so...smug about it.

Mum says she's too busy to take her. Yeah. Real busy.

Anyway, so now I'm normally the one who has to drive her around whenever Hope gets a bug up her butt about some stupid tree being cut down or something and wants to go and hassle the governor about it.

You need an appointment to see the governor but of course, Hope thinks she's above all that. She's never got past the campaign workers.

They always tell her the same thing. "We'll pass your concerns on to Governor Gottlieb". As if they really do.

I guess Hope buys it though, or else she wouldn't keep going back every time she thinks she needs to save the world.

Hope's activism takes up most of her time; study takes up most of mine.

I don't really mind. I like school and I actually like studying too. It kind of rankles that Hope never has to study, hands in all of her assignments late and she still makes straight As.

I have to work pretty hard to maintain those kinds of grades, which is something Tessa doesn't really get. She's always calling me and asking me to come and hang out.

Tessa wants me to spend all of my free time with her but I can't do that. I can hang out on weekends, but during the week, I've got work to do.

My sister is still going out with Dominic and I really am not happy about it.

She was crazy about Dominic for a while and now she spends half the time talking to Malcolm.

I feel bad for him, being pushed to the side like he so often does. I kind of had a feeling Hope would be like that.

Dominic gets a lot of girls chasing him - way more than I ever have - but so far, he hasn't really shown much interest in any of them, except for Hope.

I do like Tessa. She's fun and she's cute and everything.

She just doesn't get that I can't hang out with her 24/7 though and she's getting really annoying constantly nagging me about it. She even nags me about it when we're already hanging out. She wants to know when we can next hang out.

So I decided to end it. I thought I did it pretty gently but I guess Tessa didn't think so. She seemed really upset.

I think she's kind of mad too.

I guess maybe I should have reconsidered breaking up with her in public. People were looking. I just got so annoyed and it was kind of a spur of the moment decision. I couldn't take it any more!

It didn't take Julia long to try to move in. I'm not falling for her crap though. She used to have a crush on me but I think she's just trying to make Jack Benton jealous now. They kissed at school a couple of months ago and she's annoyed that he hasn't asked her out since then.

Notes:

• Title is from Purple Sneakers by You Am I.
• Seeing Nathan and Hope are both over 14 now (the working age in Sullivan), I wanted to get them a job this round. I did it for Nathan with no problem but Hope crashed every time. It was the exact same problem I had with Ione when she aged to teen. I went back to that entry to see if I'd written anything about how I fixed it and noticed Ione was wearing the same leggings as Hope wears. So on a whim, I changed Hope's clothes briefly and she got a job with no problem. Isn't that just the oddest fix ever? I don't know if it's the mesh, the recolour or how a clothing mesh could affect getting a job but I'm very glad I figured it out.
• Evan, Ione and Caleb all dropped over autonomously. Evan and Ione even arrived together, like a real couple would. Adorable! I love that sort of thing!
• I really wish there was a way to view the full list of who got how much money in that life insurance pop up when elders die. Filippo's policy apparently paid out to 23 different people and I'd kind of like to know who most of them were! Each of his kids got $10,000 (very welcome for Caleb and Evan's families!) and Nick got $2500, which will come in handy for him too.
• Nathan and Tessa broke up because she rolls tons of wants for him and he doesn't roll any for her, ever, even when they're on the same lot. He really does only ever want to study. Which really makes the fact that Hope's grades are higher than his even sadder. Hope never wants to skill, yet she has an A and he has a B.