A love story for teens by a teen with no love life.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Chapter Three

Pre-read note: So, I finally wrote some New Wings. It's taking me forever to finish writing this book, partially because I keep having trouble figuring out exactly how to end it. I wrote this section a bit randomly last week and just typed it out tonight, editing it a little bit. It's really cheesy and pretty rough, so I don't know exactly how I'll improve it in the next draft, but for now it works. Yeah, um, REALLY cheesy actually. But whatever, I'm moving forward, which is the important part. 
This part actually reads a lot like a mini story, almost unrelated to the novel. You don't have to have much knowledge about the story to understand it. 
Anyways, here you go... 

Part two, chapter three, section one: 
I had to tell her.
It wouldn’t be fair to her not to. I would have to make her swear not to tell my family, since I couldn’t tell them (they’d come searching). I’d leave them a note explaining everything. But her ... I had to tell her. Everything. Even if I couldn’t tell her that I was leaving, she had to know how much she meant to me, how if I had more time I would take our friendship to the next stage, how if it weren’t for the time and place we were living, I would ask her father for the permission to have her hand.
But when I reached her door, I wasn’t met with the usual view into her household, where the boys normally would be running wild and her mother would be yelling at them from the kitchen. Instead the door was closed and silence hung, but there was a note pinned to the wood.
“Find me,” it read in her perfect handwriting, “where we met for the very first time.”
We had met for the very first time when we were only six years old. It was brief, and when we met years later, at first we didn’t remember our interaction as kids. It wasn’t until a drunken night when we were fourteen that we realized that not only had we met before, but we’d been married.
I headed to the park around the corner from her house. I’d walked past it so many times but I hadn’t ventured to that playground since I’d been small. I found the arch of the swing set where we’d said our vows with six year-old ease. She’d had a bouquet of dandelions and dirt on her knees, her lips read from candy lipstick. My boutonniere of weeds and violets had been tucked into the pocket of my shirt. A seven year old pronounced us man and wife. I would count the kiss I gave her on the cheek as my first kiss until I was thirteen.
Now, standing under the arch of the swing set, she wasn’t here with a bouquet of dandelions. Instead, another note in her penmanship sat tucked under a rock and fluttering in the wind.
It read only: “Where we first danced.”
As I wandered to the old church at the end of the block, I began to wonder why she’d left me a trail of notes. I’d thought perhaps she’d just decided to go for a walk instead of meeting me at her house as planned, made the note as a cute little joke, would meet me where she said she was – but no, she hadn’t been at the park, and I doubted that I’d actually find her at the church. She had obviously turned this into a game, and I couldn’t help but wonder why.
The old bricks and wooden door of the church finally came into view. When we’d been thirteen and just friends-through-friends, we’d been dragged against our will by our classmates to the “community dance” at this church. It had been as ridiculous as expected, with only people between the ages of three and thirteen or thirty and sixty, as the older students had been smart enough to avoid the whole thing. Yet, it has been an amazing night, if only because it’d been my first slow dance with her, and looking back on it, I couldn’t care less that it had occurred beside a sixty year old couple.
Opening the doors of the church, I didn’t have to venture far into the musty building before I found my next clue. Written on a pink piece of paper and tacked to a notice board, it read: “The place where they know our order before we say a word.”
I stuck the clue in my pocket and headed back out into the sunshine. Taking a right, I headed towards the little row of locally owned businesses in our area of the city. We lived in a fairly large city, but we always seemed to end up at the same small bakery when we were looking for somewhere to grab coffee and baked goods. They were the only place that always knew our order before we placed it.
The last time I’d been there had been with her, to celebrate her seventeenth birthday a month ago. I’d bought her her usual, as well as a book I knew she’d wanted to read but hadn’t been able to find. Luckily, I’d come across a signed copy at a used book store just a few weeks before. She’d been thrilled.
When I got to the store, it was crowded with people buying their weekend loaves. With the war and the reduced rations, the bakery had been suffering a little, but they were able to keep their best selling items and maintained their stream of loyal customers. As I began to dig through my pocket for change, a young boy called out from behind the counter.
“You’re Jake, right?” He pointed at me and I nodded.
He pulled a brown paper bag from underneath the counter and handed it towards me, “This is for you.”
I took it from his small hands, but before I could ask any questions he was back to fetching orders for the adults.
I opened the bag, and not surprisingly, found one banketaaf and one appelflappen, our usual order. However, there was also some sort of donut and a note folded between napkins.
“Go to the place we first introduced ourselves to each other (one of my favourite places.”
This walk was a little longer. After leaving the bakery, I had to circle back through the park and past her house, then down the street to the school.
We’d met officially when we twelve and thirteen. We’d lived in the same neighbourhood for years before that, but she’d been attending a religious school. When her school closed, she’d started at the same public school as me. We met that her first day, when she entered art class mid-semester. She’d worn a smile that lit her whole face and a glint in her eye that told you she was excited to there, holding a paintbrush, meeting new people.
The school was closed for the summer, classes having been cut shorter and shorter as the Nazis invaded. I found the front door open, though, and headed straight for the art room. I was surprised to find Mr. Peters sitting at the big wooden desk at the front of the room. A pen was perched in his hand over a piece of parchment, ready to attack with black ink.
“Jake Hepburn!” He exclaimed as he smiled at me, putting his pen carefully at his side. His eyes sparkled as he added, “I was told you’d be bringing me something in exchange for a note?”
I pulled the donut out of the bag I was carrying, the odd one out now explained.
“This is for you, Mr Peters,” I said, handing him the pastry. He grinned, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket with his free hand as he bit into the donut.
“Delicious, Jake, thank you,” he mumbled as I took the paper from him.
“Um, Mr Peters,” I started, “You wouldn’t happen to know – ”
He shook his end, some small crumbs scattering over his shirt. “I know nothing. She wouldn’t tell me a thing. I asked, but she said that you may ask questions, and she didn’t want to me give anything away.” He giggled an odd sort of laugh. “Oh, to be seventeen again!”
I smiled, heading back towards the door. “Thank you anyways. Nice seeing you again, Mr Peters.”
“Good luck, Jake!” He called as I left the room.
I paused in the hallway to read the note.
“I’m sitting in place where we discussed what we want to do with our lives and the countries we want to go to, where we laughed and cried, where we’ve sat side by side for hours. It’s the place where we’ve returned again and again, and each time I remember that one night when we were fifteen and I realized I was falling for you as more than just a friend, it was just you, wearing my favourite colour, and me, just a freak with big ears.”
At first I didn’t understand the note... then it sank in: she liked me back.
I felt all the air rush out of my body as the stress escaped and I smiled with all my heart, alone in an empty school hallway.
She liked me back.
Suddenly I needed to tell her I wanted to be more than friends – I needed to wrap my arms around her, smell her perfume, feel her skin, see her smile. But, the clue left me confused. There were so many places over the years where we’d discussed our futures, so many nights we’d sat side by side and just laughed or cried. Even if we’d “returned again and again,” it didn’t narrow it down much, as there were quite a few places where we hung out that I hadn’t been to yet.
I reread the note again. The last comment stuck out to me, if only because she did not have big ears.
Then it made sense. When we were fifteen, we’d gone to see “Dumbo” together at the movie theatre downtown, but we had shown up an hour too early. We’d ended up sitting in an empty theatre for an hour, just waiting and talking about nothing and everything. I’d been wearing yellow. She’d loved the movie about the elephant, the “freak with big ears,” who didn’t fit in but who got the happy ending.
I broke into a run down the hallway and out the door into the afternoon air. I ran three streets down just to catch a streetcar headed in the right direction. I could hardly sit still on the short trip, then I was off again, finally rounding a corner and hitting the theatre doors at a good pace. It was completely empty with not a person in sight, but I just kept going, bursting through the doors of theatre two. The lights were on but dimmed, and the screen sat in shadows. It took me a second to see her, sitting in the middle of the seats, her blonde hair loose around her shoulders.
Sofie.
She turned at the sound of my entrance and smiled. With only a second of hesitation, I jogged down the aisle towards her. She stood up and looked as though she was about to say hello, but before she a word escaped her mouth, I was beside her. In one fluid motion, I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her gently by surely on the lips.
And for a moment, I forgot everything. The world around me stood still of politics and time, people and space. I forgot that my father had been killed recently. I forgot that I was soon to be the dreaded eighteen years of age. I forgot that I was running away in a week. I forgot that I was leaving Sofie and she didn’t know.
For that moment, I forgot everything, because for that moment, I had her. 

Sunday, June 26, 2011

I lied.

I lied about a few things. Let's list them in an orderly fashion.


1) I said I'd have my book done by May 31st, 2011, and that my Facebook page for Annika would die that day. Lies. All of it. I'm still not done my novel, and although I have not updated Annika's Facebook page in a long, long time, it's still online.
2) I lied about my characters. Remember how, especially in those first couple of posts, I wrote disclaimers about how this is a first draft, so please don't get upset when things change around and no, there was no warning in the previous chapters? WELL, it's happening now, and I thought I should warn you. 
Remember Sofie? She's not a main character, actually she's quite minor. She's mentioned near the beginning of the book as Jake's sister who died during World War I, and reappears in the second half of the novel. Well, that's lies. Maybe Jake clearly lied to Annika in the beginning about her being his sister, but I have decided that she was never a blood relative or relative of any kind to Jake at all. They were friends. 


Oh, actually, that might be all I lied about. That seems like not a lot when I list it in an orderly fashion. 
Happy reading, people. Expect an actual blog post soon.