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. 

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.  

Chapter Two

Please note: I have had writer's block forever it feels like now. I wrote this awhile ago and thought I'd edit it before posting, but I'm questioning where the story is going now, so anyways, I'm just posting it.

Part II, chapter two, section one:

The door creaked as we pushed it open. A silence fell around the room of directors, each sitting in their proper black and white suits, watching us with their emotionless eyes. I shut the door behind us and sat at a chair along the wall. John quickly sat down beside me.

The man sitting at the head of the long table stood. He looked around the room at the twenty or so seated people before beginning to speak.

“We have made a decision about Annika McCalden’s case.”

You could have heard a pin drop in the room.

“This is a special case that already was bending rules and following a loose guide.”

The mono tone droned on.

“With this in consideration, we can see how it went wrong and will make sure that it does not occur again.”

There was a dramatic long pause. I twisted my hands into knots.

“However, from what we can understand, we have not simply lost Annika McCalden here, but we have lost her spirit. With consultation with the higher board, we have decided that this case is to be put to rest and the search for Annika McCalden to end.”

I squeezed my eyes closed tight and held my breath, wishing that I was hearing wrong, wishing and hoping and praying they weren’t announcing the end of everything I knew.

“Jake.”

I looked up at the mono tone voiced man, biting my tongue. He looked at me with piercing blue eyes.

“You are dismissed from her case.”

I nodded a long, slow nod, the movement killing me on the inside.

“We can only hope that her spirit can find a world in which she can find peace and rest.”

There was a small murmur of voices but my eyes were shut again.

“You may leave.”

The sound of movement and voices wrapped my body in present time and space, but I wasn’t there. A moment later someone put their hand around mine and I realized I’d been gripping the sides of the chair. I opened my eyes to see John’s deep eyes and red marks on my hands.

“Let’s go, Jake,” John said quietly.

Somehow I made myself stand; somehow I ended up in the elevator. The doors made that annoying “ding” sound as they enclosed me and John into the tight space.

I closed my eyes again.

“Ding.”

“Jake, this is our floor,” I heard John say, but I shook my head.

“I need some air,” I replied.

I opened my eyes to see him step off the elevator and the door close behind him, then shut them again.

What is wrong with me?

“Ding.”

It was the first floor. A lady all in black stepped into the elevator and suddenly there was no more oxygen. Narrowly avoiding the doors, I jogged out of the elevator and they closed behind me.

The first floor....

My feet knew where they were going before I did. I wandered through the bright reception area to the white, hospital-like halls that spread like a maze through this floor. Eventually, I came to the larger-than-life oak doors of the library.

I had read the file, I knew the evidence. Slowly, I wandered the same aisle as I knew she’d been in. There wasn’t a soul in the space, the room echoed with my footsteps. I paused at my drawer. It was closed, and went I opened it, my file was neatly and safely tucked away from sight, but I knew it hadn’t been like this when they had come in this morning, I knew they’d come to find fading photos and crumpled papers littering the ground in a tornado-like mess.

I couldn’t imagine reading the file. I had never touched it; I had always been too scared at what I would find, since I knew it would be the truth, the truth that I hadn’t told Annika. No wonder she’d run from this world: I had scared her away.

The file felt heavy and final in my hands as I picked it up. As I gently opened it, the first image I was met with was one of Sofie.

Suddenly tears threatened my eyes.

When I closed my eyes, I could still see the way hers sparkled when she smiled. When I shut my eyes tight, I could still hear her laugh and the way her curls would cascade down her back. When I squeezed them close, I could feel the soft touch of her hands in mine. I could remember the nights we’d spend making blanket forts and the times we snuck out to go to dances. The years we spent walking to school together still felt like yesterday and the long brush strokes with her smalls hands felt so close that I could swear I was back there again. Except, when she looked up from the painting, it wasn’t Sofie smiling at me, but Annika.

Suddenly my eyes opened wide. The tear that had been waiting fell down my cheeks. My legs gave out beneath me and I slid down the bookshelf to the ground. The photo in my hand smiled up at me like a ghost from another world, and I could see the similarities now clearly. They had almost the same long, blonde hair and both had vibrant blue eyes. The delicate features of Sofie were similar to those of Annika, and then there was their hands, both small and gentle and aching to hold a paintbrush.

I had failed them both.

The minutes ticked by like hours as I cried in the empty library. Once the memories started, they just came flooding back in an avalanche I couldn’t control.

Part II: Chapter One

Pre-read note: Here's another twist! Ok, the problem right now though, other than the fact I'm writing New Wings instead of studying for my exams, is that I am not sure where Part II is heading. I'm tempted to leave it as a cliff-hanger, but at the same time, I do like conclusion. I am still writing, though, which means I'm writing without direction. Hopefully I figure out where it's going soon so I can finish the story. I really, really want it to be done, but in other ways I'm terrified to write the second draft. The second draft would be so... official. And if I'm not posting it online, what will I do? What will motivate me? 

Anyways, here's the beginning of part II. It's long but not dense. 

Part II, chapter one, section one:

“Sit down.”

I ignored the voice despite the stern edge to it.

“Sit down or you’re going to pace a hole through my floor.”

I looked up at the man, sitting calmly at his desk, unfazed by the current events, and bit my tongue. Swearing at him would get me nowhere anyways. But I couldn’t stop my feet from moving in circles through the small office space.

“Jake, sit down!”

The sudden burst of anger made me freeze. I caught his eye for a moment and noticed a change in them. They seemed a shade darker than they usually were.

I sighed and sat down across from the man at the desk, placing my hand in my hands.

“I’m sorry, John,” I said to the floor by my feet.

“You need to calm down, Jake. We’ll have orders from the head office soon enough.”

I swallowed words again. The orders from the head office were not the first thing on my mind. Although, I knew they were going to have an impact, a huge impact.

“John...”

“Yes, Jake.”

“You don’t think...”

I looked up at him, typing away something into a black laptop. He glanced up at me for a moment through his paperwork, saying, “You can’t be fired from being a Guider,” then returned to the steady typing.

“That’s not what’s worrying me.”

“What is it then?”

“When they find her, you don’t think they’ll wipe her memory, do you?”

John paused, organizing files on his desk before answering my question.

“What they decide is not up to you or me, and it certainly is not something for you to worry about it.”

My head fell back into my hands again. They were considering it, and there was a strong probability it would happen then.

“Why does this bother you so much? You’ve had other New Wings who you no longer can have contact with. This one just ended earlier than you expect.”

With that sentence he confirmed what I had already been quite sure was going to happen: they were taking her away from me, I was no longer her Guider.

“Jake?”

I couldn’t pull my head from my hands.

“Jake? This doesn’t have anything to do with...?”

I didn’t have the energy to protest in defence the way I knew I should.

“You didn’t... did you?”

I shook my head back and forth in my hands, but it was a pathetic attempt to deny it.

“You fell for her?”

His voice was calm, but it turned angry. “You fell for her!”

There was ruffling of paper and the slamming of a laptop shut, then silence.

John sighed quietly before speaking again. “You brought this upon yourself. This is bad, but it doesn’t change much. The plan was for her to fall for you anyways, so this doesn’t complicate much besides the degree to which she probably fell. I’m assuming you left a few things out of the reports, then?”

I looked up, although avoiding his eyes. “I skipped a few nights.”

“You didn’t mention anything to her then, though? You never, ever brought up the reports? Or that you could guess what would happen the next day? There was nothing to make her suspect, right?”

John looked at me sternly as I answered honestly, “No.”

He continued to stare until I responded, “No, of course not. I never know anything much about the plan anyways, I was only told what I needed to know for the next day, never even any further ahead. Besides, she only figured it out because I left my cell in her room. She wasn’t suspicious before that.”

John shuffled his papers around again, picking up a thick black folder.

“This,” he said to me slowly, “Was her plan... until she broke it, and we lost her.”

He handed me the folder. It took me a moment before I could open it. Inside were charts with dates. They started at the time Annika had arrived in Heaven, and they described in less detail the things that I already knew. There were days on the beach, the problems she faced with friends, the ups and downs she’d felt in this world. What surprised me, tough, was that it had been planned that she’d be able to remember her past from the first day.

“You knew she was going to remember? Why didn’t you warn me? That day in the hospital, sitting outside the window with her, I panicked. I’d thought something was wrong.”

“We needed you to panic,” he responded. “It was one of the things that kept her ok, kept her moving despite her knowledge of the past.”

I sighed and glanced back down, then another question came to my mind.

“I always wondered: why did you have us keep a relationship a secret, if you had it in the plan too?”

“It was unique to this plan, to break the rules of Guider and New Wings, so it was decided that in order to cause the less disruption it would be easiest if you kept it secret. Then again, you were not supposed to fall for her remember? I have a feeling that you skipped more than just a few nights in your descriptions.”

I looked down, avoiding the statement, and kept reading. When it came to the date of that day, there were descriptions of things that were supposed to happen, but didn’t. The plan went on for three more months and two more weeks, although I quickly noticed that the descriptions for each day got progressively smaller and less detailed.

“Why does it end where it does?” I asked.

“The day after that would be her re-naming ceremony, the end of her time with you, her Guider, and her complete integration into the society.”

“Is that why it gets less detailed as it gets closer to the end, then? Because she’s more integrated?”

John reached across the desk and gently took the folder from my hands. “Yes and no. But I can’t tell you the full details, since I don’t even know the full details.”

This was something I was used to by this point, not being told the whole story. I nodded at John, who tucked the black folder into a drawer of his desk.

The phone on his desk began to ring and he picked it up with a swift movement. There were no introductions or informal conversation, and after a second of listening, John said simply, “Thank you.”

Then he looked up at me. “They’ve made their decision. We’re to go up to the boardroom now.”

Chapter 25 (post four) The End of Part 1

Pre-note: To make this extra confusing, I have decided to break my book up into parts. Therefor, this is the end of part 1. Please don't make fun of my writing -- I'm not feeling like it's flowing the way I want it to lately. 

Chapter twenty-five, section four, the end of part one:

There always comes a breaking point. For me, it was that moment, holding the doorknob and looking into the stairwell with my mind too full to think anymore.

I don’t remember much. Or, rather, I choose not to remember much. Each time I think back the pain emotions start to trickle through my body again.

I can tell you that I remember the floor. Running through those hospital-like halls, I had lost my shoes. Bare feet pounding on the cold tiles, I had just kept running. Standing in the doorway, I felt my feet loosing feeling.  

I can tell you about the stairwell. The whitewash covered everything, including the concrete beneath my feet as I sped up the stairs until I reached the top. Here there was nothing but a pair of big black doors, which I hit still at a run. The fresh air and starlight that I emerged into startled me to a stop.

I can tell you the stars were gorgeous that night. The moon was nowhere in sight, but the stars were sprinkled across the sky like powdered sugar across a black granite countertop. I remember the feel of the fresh air in my lungs and the gravel pinching beneath my toes as I wandered around the top of the building until I stopped right at the edge.

Can I tell you that that what I would do next was out of character for me? That the idea had never crossed my mind back on earth? That it wasn’t until that moment on the roof that I was desperate enough to even consider it?

Around the edge ran a small barrier that came up to my calves. I stopped a few inches from it and looked out at the skyline of Soleres. The building was tall enough that the view it provided was picturesque. The unlit buildings glowed in shadows cast by starlight, looking like the beginning of the ending of the world.

 My heart shuddered as I placed my one foot onto the low wall, then the other.

Suddenly there was nothing between me and the sky. I felt like I was somewhere between reality and fantasy, the end and the beginning, the physical and the beyond. My wings shook as I glanced downwards into the black abyss and didn’t stop until I look back up the sky.

I don’t remember what came first, my conscious decision or my feet no longer grounded, but I do remember the breathless, hard feeling of falling.

The End of Part 1

Chapter 25 (post three)

Pre-read note: My writing is crap. I have all these ideas but when I write them out, I feel like they are nothing but disappointing. Rather than dwell on this, though, I am just going to run with it. Especially since I think I am coming closer and closer to the end of New Wings. 

Chapter twenty-five, section three:

What is real?

Is anything?

Was my friendship with Jake real? Was my relationship with him real? Was he even real, or had he always been acting and lying?

I looked up at the bookcase towering above me, the file drawer open where I had pulled Jake’s files from.

What is this place? What is this world?

I slowly stood up, wiping my eyes.

I could feel myself started to shudder again, I could feel the tears threatening again. But this time I shook my head back and forth, clearing my thoughts until I was standing in this dark passage through history with the only emotion that comes after breakdown: anger.

I felt something pulse through me that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time: the drive to run. It drove me out the door of the library, leaving the photos and files scattered everywhere, and down bright, windowless hallways. My feet carried me faster and faster until I was running in circles through the maze of the building. I hit a dead end with only a single wooden door and I stopped although I was hardly out of breath, realizing I was lost.

For a second I considered what I was running from exactly. I couldn’t quite pinpoint it. Not Jake exactly, but what he represented. Not my school itself, but the idea behind it. Not Amy or the others, but their values and beliefs. Not the graphs or the charts, but the control embedded in them.

I’m running from this world.

That’s when I opened the door in front of me to find – a stairwell.