NaNo starts today!
Teaser! No editing allowed, that's for December.
“What’re you reading?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Quick fingers grabbed the book away. “Liar!”
She crossed her arms. “So?”
“Do they know you’re reading this?”
“What if they do?
“I think you’re lying again.” Her brother regarded her with a smirk. “I bet they don’t. Maybe I should tell.”
“Tell them what? That I’m sitting peacefully reading a book once I’ve finished all my work? Oh, yeah, that’ll go over real well.”
He tossed it in the air, caught it. “Where’d you get it, anyway? I didn’t think we had any of this stuff around the house.”
“Please. Like I’d tell you.”
He only shrugged. “Your funeral…”
“The library. Don’t tell.”
“Fine. But you know it’s useless. It’ll only distract you. It’s not real.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Ellen was eight years old when she discovered that faery tales could be more fun than actually reading her school books. She was very, very careful to keep this discovery from her parents and brother. Somehow she was quite certain that her parents would disapprove – and what else were younger brothers for than for tattling – well, and annoying their elders, but that was the same thing, wasn't it?
Anyways, she managed to hide from her parents for a long time, but she couldn't quite keep Jason out of her business (and out of her books). Luckily enough, even though he couldn't figure out the point of reading them, he didn't tell – although he blackmailed her with it more than a few times. So typical of him. But he wasn't that bad, and he never did really tell.
She loved those books. They seemed to call to her, tales of unicorns and dragons and griffins and faeries and princesses running through her dreams. Sometimes Ellen wondered why she couldn't see them for real, in her bedroom, or better yet in her school, and then remembered that they weren't really real, not like Math and English and Science were. But she still wished, and she still loved to read the stories, so she kept on sneaking books home from the library to read when her chores were finished and homework done.
Sometimes she tried to talk about her stories with her bestest-best friend Jennifer. Jenny would squeal, “Oh, that's so romantic,” and ask to hear more about the handsome prince. But then, when Ellen would wish for the unicorns or dragons to appear at school, Jenny would look scared. “Why would you want that?” she'd ask. “That would be bad! The teachers would all get mad, and we wouldn't have any lessons or homework, and then we couldn't even go to high school because we wouldn't know anything!” (High school was the highlight of Jenny's existence.) And Ellen would try to explain that unicorns were beautiful, and it would be worth it to have one at school, or even a dragon if you gave it lots of milk....
No, Jennifer never really got it. Sometimes she thought she should tell Christopher, instead, because Chris always listened, and he loved animals so much (even though she thought it was a little strange to always be trying to tame the wild cats around the school with lunch-scraps.) Once Ellen started to talk about dragons – but Chris looked confused and asked why you would want a giant lizard with wings, and anyway dogs were cooler, and the hawk he saw at the school Science Fair. So she didn't talk about the stories when she was around him. And obviously Jason was out, because, really, he was her little brother, and he didn't know anything anyways.
And eventually it stopped being important, to talk about it, because there was so much homework to do, between her school-classes and her piano lessons – and then her mother started her on flute, and there was barely enough time in the day to play with her friends, let alone read...
