Great Idea

Okay I've got a REALLY REALLY REALLY good story idea. In fact, it's so good that I'm not going to post it here because I'm actually afraid someone will plagiarize it (I know, egotistic; but still, you can never be too safe!)!!

I Want

I was just going through my head about all the things I want and agonizing over how I probably won't get most of them (no I'm not that materialistic), and I got this great idea:

A book, tracking a junior high school girl (9th grade) from School Day 1 all the way through School Day 180 (obviously skipping the ones that are useless; the chapter titles are the School Day numbers). Anyway, every Saturday night, when it's possible, she updates her blog: I Want Possibilities. The format of the blog entries is a bit like this:

Saturday: Month, Day, Year
I WANT...
1) ____________ possible--but only if ________
2) ____________ impossible--but maybe I can _________

I dunno. Just some random idea that suddenly flicked through my mind and I just had to pin it down quickly so I can come back to it sometime when I'm lucid.

The End of the World

So I was watching this thing on the History Channel last night, and it was about how the Bible prophesies doom and all that. Anyway, I was reminded if The Expected One (one of my fave books), and I thought "Omigod how cool would it be if I wrote something like that?"

Well, basically what would happen is this girl, Sarah, is an orphan, raised in a Jewish family. Her twin sister, Tamara, died, but the circumstances are unclear. All she knows is that Tamara died right after the girls were found walking by the roadside. Her surrogate mother has been instructing her about the End of the World, as prophesied in the Bible. Sarah and Tamara were found May 14, 1948, the day of the "founding" of Israel.

Basically what happens is that after the surrogate parents die, Sarah goes out into the world as a writer, and automatically walks towards Israel in her research of the End of the World. As she learns more and more, she starts having visions of the times of Jesus Christ, and eventually she figures out that she is seeing everything from the eyes of Jesus Christ himself.

So yeah, Sarah turns out to be the reincarnation of Christ, and her twin sister, Tamara, who isn't really dead, turns out to be the Anti-Christ. When the two girls were found, the surrogate Jewish family who found them saw the symbols of the Anti-Christ on Tamara and were afraid. They stabbed her in the wrists, feet, and stomach, and left her to die by the roads. However, she was found and taken to the hospital, where she was saved and taken for the "true" reincarnation of Christ because of the stab wounds (you know, where Christ was stabbed by the cross and all that; I forgot the name... oh yeah, stigmata).

And then it's an "epic battle" between Sarah and Tamara, except the battle is really inside the two of them, because they ARE twin sisters after all and how hard would it be to learn you're supposed to kill your own sister? So what eventually happens is that there's an eclipse, and the stress of the decision bursts blood vessels in both of their brains, at the exact same time, the exact same vessel, and so they both die. The moment they both touch the ground, the eclipse is over.

Vampire and Hunter

I had this amazing idea one night as I was printing something, and, without delay, I wrote out the characters and plotted out everything. I haven't been this intrigued in a story for awhile, which is a good thing, especially seeing as how my cousin is demanding at least 150 pages of a story by February >.< Well, anyway, here's the Prologue! And, if I don't get discouraged, I'll post up more!
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Prologue

Three years ago…
“I’ll be back near dawn, so don’t wait up,” Abraham Van Helsing instructed his daughter as he shrugged his long brown trench coat on. Despite his words, they both knew that she would wait up, no matter how late he came back. She always did.
Fourteen-year-old Carmen Van Helsing untangled her legs and, setting down the book she was reading, walked over to her father. While straightening his collar and helping to put his hat on, she asked casually, “What’s the job this time?”
Abraham laughed and pinched his daughter’s cheek, saying, “I don’t believe I’ll tell you that, darling.”
Carmen pouted and pretended to be sad.
Abraham shook his finger laughingly in mock severity.
Carmen grabbed his finger and pretended to bite it off.
It was a tradition father and daughter had kept up for over a decade, and it was still faithfully practiced despite Carmen’s increasingly-obvious womanhood.
“Have a safe night, Father,” she called out as her father vanished into the darkness surrounding Van Helsor Manor’s grounds. He paused briefly to wave back, and then disappeared. Everything was the same as it always was—so why did Carmen feel as if she would never see her father again?

Exuding confidence and casualty, Abraham walked into the darkening forest, aware of every sound and movement; decades of training had imbedded the skill into him so it had become as thoughtless as a natural-born reflex.
There was no sound that night—all was quiet, and the famous vampire hunter listened to the tiny sounds of leaves crunching under his boots. Glancing up, he noted with an odd sense of detachment that the stars had just begun to show.
And then everything went black.

When Abraham woke up, he was suspended by ropes that tied his wrists to a tree about fifty feet from the ground. Utterly confused, he shook his head slightly, hoping to clear his muddled thoughts.
“Ah, I see our guest has awakened,” crooned a soft voice that came from inside him, yet echoed all around. Abraham stiffened at the sound—he would know that voice anywhere.
“Vega?” he asked, praying it would be his sister playing another practical joke.
The voice laughed, a tinkling sound that sent shivers up the hunter’s spine. “Guess again.”
“…Magdalena.” It wasn’t a question. If the voice wasn’t his sister’s, it could only be his late wife’s.
“You’re getting warmer,” the voice sang out yet again.
Abraham wracked his mind, and finally came up with the last person in the world it could possibly be. “Carmen? If that’s you, darling, this isn’t funny.”
“It isn’t meant to be funny—and I’m not Carmen.” A vampire suddenly dropped from the branches above to land on the branch that Abraham was tied to. She smiled, showing her fearsomely long and pointed teeth. “Do you remember the name you gave me?”
The vampire watched in satisfaction as Abraham’s eyes widened and fear shot through his body, making it shiver and twitch. “Sorin…”
She laughed and, twisting her body so she was safely balanced against the tree trunk, clapped her hands mockingly. “Congratulations, Father. You still remember me!”
“You never left my mind.” How could he forget his vampire daughter? He had spent so many nights, agonizing over his decision…
Sorin laughed bitterly, Abraham watching her blood-red lips move in that stark-white face, entranced. “I beg to differ. Your words are those of nights spent comforting yourself over your cowardly decision!”
“It was for the best. And I gave you a chance to live.”
“Just a chance! While my sister had the best doctors fighting to save her frail little heart to keep her breaths shuddering through her body!”
“If you had stayed, we all would have died.”
“No. We would have become vampires. Which, of course, in your view, is worse. And I suppose you’ve brainwashed Carmen already. There wasn’t even a guarantee that you all would become vampires! I didn’t start drinking blood until I was seven, by which I could’ve learned not to drink my family’s blood!”
“Sorin, Carmen has a scar she carries to this day. You gave it to her using your sharp little teeth as soon as you were born! You were born with teeth! We couldn’t risk it.”
“We? By ‘we,’ I believe you mean yourself. Because, of course, you had already decided that Mother had to die.”
“She was a full-fledged vampire, uncontrollable in her first urges, yet she held back for us. I couldn’t stand watching her in agony, and at last she begged for me to kill her so she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore.”
“All lies!” hissed Sorin venomously, her bright blue cat-like eyes slanting dangerously. “You killed Mother, and tried to kill me! You are nothing more than a cowardly, selfish murderer!” She spat the last word out at her father. “I won’t even give you the benefits of being a vampire. I’m going to kill you right here and now!”
“No!” protested Abraham. “Think about your sister! Carmen isn’t old enough to take care of herself! She’s only fourteen!”
“I was three months old when you threw me out into the forest to be eaten alive by the wild creatures of the night! I have been alone all my life! I am alone now, and I am only thirteen minutes older than Carmen!
“I’ve watched her through the years, sneaking glimpses through brightly-lit windows. You’ve been so careful and doting to her; it sickens me! You’ve never even done half so much for me!
“I wanted to be loved too! I’m half-human! I craved the warmth of a father’s embrace, my mother having been taken away cruelly. I craved the love of a family to help me through my hardest blood-urges when there was no blood to be had. I resisted drinking your blood, although I had millions of chances to do so! There was a period when I tried not to drink blood at all, in the hopes that I could one day walk through the front gates, proudly stating that I was a vampire who did not drink blood! I dreamed of being accepted!
“But all that changed the day I stumbled upon Sonya, dying in one of your infernal traps. My only friend besides Miruna and her daughter Sabine, who had found me! I was rejected by the vampires for being half-human, and I was rejected by humans for being half-vampire. My life has been nothing but loss and rejection!
“And this is all because of you!” During Sorin’s entire monologue, Abraham had not spoken because he was so shocked.
However, now, realizing that Sorin’s rage had peaked and was waning, he felt she was waiting for him to respond with something—anything. Without anything better to say, he gave a wan smile: “You sound so much like your mother. She didn’t get angry easily, but when she did… The thought that someone could speak with such eloquence while caught up in the deepest fires of passion amazed me. She was beautiful when she was angry, and I loved her most then.
“I love you too, Sorin, every bit as much as Carmen. I couldn’t face the thought of you hurting Carmen and then sinking into depression because you had hurt your beloved sister—”
At first his cheek was numb, and then it exploded in a red flower of pain. He stared in dumbfound wonder at Sorin, who had just slapped him.
With her hand still in the position it had landed in after slapping him and a faint flush making her face glow and eyes sparkle, Sorin looked like Magdalena in the flesh. “I wish,” she began in a low voice, swelling as her anger began to rise again, “that you would just shut up! Stop lying to yourself! Stop lying to Carmen! Stop lying to me! All you ever say are lies.” Sorin’s voice sank again, making her sound like a little girl who was about to cry. “Don’t lie to me anymore, Daddy…”
Abraham stared at his daughter, feeling his chest tighten, longing to reach over and pull her to him and comfort her so those pearly tears never fell again. “I won’t,” he promised, his voice husky with walled-up emotion.
At his words, Sorin snapped out of her reverie, eyes glittering dangerously again. “Damn right you won’t,” she smiled eerily. “I’ll make sure you never lie to anyone ever again.”
Abraham Van Helsing, most famous of the vampire hunters, didn’t even have time to utter a sound as his dhampir daughter plunged a silver stake through his heart, the enormity of her strength allowing it to pierce through his body to his back.
How ironic, he mused as his life’s essence began slipping away. All this time, I used silver stakes to kill vampires and thought of them as animals… Funny how I can’t help but love my daughter… I’m sorry for having to leave you, Carmen… Take care of your sister… I love you…
And so Abraham Van Helsing died, rising into God’s palace without ever specifying who he had meant while thinking those last three words.

The Last Thread

Admittedly, I haven't posted many of my stories. That's mainly because I'm mostly writing fanfiction now, and haven't had any really good, fresh story ideas for a while now. It's really frustrating, but I think I just have a bad bout of writer's block. Maybe the story I wrote for English that I'm posting here will help me. Pray that it's so!

*Note: These are not from my personal experiences. I am not a psychiatric consultant. I have never had a boyfriend and most certainly have never been raped. This story was entirely created out of my head, helped along by the various Edgar Allan Poe stories I have been reading recently.

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I am beginning to go insane from flashbacks of the traumatic incident I have witnessed recently; as a psychiatric consultant specializing in recovery from traumatic happenings, I know this. Therefore, the police are encouraging me to record my experiences as quickly as possible, and thus I have shunned a pen and am currently typing this.

Despite having graduated at an early age, I quickly became a renowned psychiatrist both in and out of Detroit, where I worked. I had never met a case I couldn’t help in less than a year—that is, never before I met Cheryl Robinson.

Cheryl had been date-raped by her boyfriend of two years.

“When I was young, it was absolutely unheard of to have a boyfriend before you were eighteen, let alone fifteen!” my sixty-seven-year-old receptionist had tutted when sending in Cheryl’s profile.

She wasn’t much different from my other cases—a young teenager going through shock after a traumatic event. “Okay,” I sighed as I finished flipping through the file and put it into my drawer labeled Current Teenagers. “Send her in.” Fully prepared for a girl clothed completely in black and wearing only black makeup, imagine my surprise when I saw a perfectly normal-seeming, happy-go-lucky fourteen-year-old walk in.

“Good morning,” Cheryl smiled. “How are you, Doctor?” I quickly ran my eye down her outfit: green—the color of peace; sleeveless—unafraid of her sex being noticed; jeans—casual and unworried.

“I’m great,” I smiled back. “You?”

“School’s been a hassle,” she laughed, bright blue eyes dancing—dancing somehow too merrily. Knowing that these things should not be dismissed as simply something wrong with the eyes, I jotted down a note about it.

“I remember the feeling; all those teachers trying to be your overlords!” I joked, eliciting a giggle from my patient. And thus we passed the allotted two hours, laughing and joking like old friends; I was careful to steer the conversation in areas that had nothing to do with romance or recent events.

Our half-year meeting was slightly different from the others. Cheryl had seemed to try to stay away from any subjects relating to rape in any way; she hadn’t done that in the first meeting. Hoping to put her at ease, I gave her a questionnaire containing questions about what she liked to eat, what movies she liked, who was in her family, etc. After she left, I went through the questions and answers. One of her answers intrigued me. “Have you ever seen a psychiatrist before?” I had written on the sheet.

“Not that I know of!” she had written in what was clearly meant to be a joking way.

Something was wrong there. Why hadn’t she simply written “No” and been done with it? I played back the recorded notes on her handwriting I had and noticed immediately that she had written in a sinuous stroke, meaning that she redirects the questions to ignore the facts. Had she been in therapy once and simply blocked it out of her mind? For the first time since I’d begun this career, I wished I hadn’t signed a confidentiality form; I wanted desperately to talk to this girl’s parents about her.

As our meetings progressed, Cheryl became further and further drawn in and wearing steadily lighter clothing. She had taken to wearing yellow—a sure sign that she was trying to pretend she was all right. The only conclusion I could draw was that something was going on that she didn’t feel she could trust anybody with. She also acted happy rather convincingly; had I not given her a questionnaire to fill out each time and analyzed her handwriting each time or had I not been a psychologist, I would have believed she was recovering from the shock very well.

Eventually, after an entire year of biweekly sessions, I began losing sleep over this girl. She wasn’t the Cheryl I had gotten used to after the first three sessions.

Once, after she had taken to wearing white, she had interrupted me when I called her Cheryl. “Doctor, please don’t call me Cheryl anymore. My friends and I decided that Hunapo would be a much better name for me.”

“Hmm that’s interesting… Do you think I should get a new name?” I knew not to ask her a direct question pertaining to why she had decided to change her name. But, for once, Cheryl—or rather, Hunapo—chose to ignore me, and I became increasingly worried at her unusual behavior. As shown by her wearing light clothing to persuade everybody that she was happy, it was quite obvious to me that she was uneasy about her self-identity.

After about a year and a half, I was beginning to give up on my Cheryl-Hunapo case; perversely, I began sleeping better. Quite ashamedly to say, I once recorded, “I fear I cannot hold onto this case for much longer; she is simply changing too strangely and too oddly, and she refuses to trust me with any information at all. Nothing she says gives me any insight into her and neither does anything she does. Everything is always perfectly neutral with her. And I am afraid that I am becoming neutral about her case as well.”

“Doctor, don’t call me Hunapo anymore,” she said after two years. “My name is Enola now.”

Personality problems, I scribbled onto my notes and began to worry, but outwardly I laughed and said, “I love that name! The main character of one of my favorite books had that name!”

Cheryl-Hunapo-Enola looked at me angrily, and demanded, “Why do you always act like you don’t care? I know you do; it’s part of your job. If I know and you know I know, why do you still act like you don’t care about me? Why do you act like you don’t care about me changing my name?” Before I could answer, she got up. “This is wasting my time and money. I don’t need someone who pretends she doesn’t care about me while trying to worm her way into my trust. How can I give you my trust when you don’t even trust me?” she hissed. “When I come back, I expect treatment worthy of the money I’m paying.” She left.

Instead of coming at the prescribed time for her session, Cheryl-Hunapo-Enola came when I was the only one still in the building on the day of her next session. The first I knew of her coming was a vague shadow on the dappled glass window and a rapid tapping on my office door. “It’s unlocked,” I called, lazy as I was to open the door myself, as I busied myself with shuffling papers in preparation for going home.

“Good evening, Doctor,” an abnormally low female voice issued from the growing crack in the doorway. “I apologize for not coming to my session today, so I am here now to make it up.”

Feeling the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, I struggled against the urge to panic, telling myself it was only a voice, and ran through the list of patients who hadn’t come for their session on that day. There was only one. “Enola, it’s so nice to see you,” I smiled, turning around and facing the crack in the doorway. “Can I do anything for you tonight?”

“I just need some help with my boyfriend, that’s all.” I inwardly breathed a sigh of relief; finally, a normal teenage problem!

“Of course; come in!” I walked over to the door, ignoring the growing dread in the pit of my stomach, and pulled it open, nearly fainting at what I saw there.

Cheryl-Hunapo-Enola—no; I knew this monster was not Cheryl, the bright-eyed, laughing teenager I had known, nor was she Hunapo, who, although having an attitude problem, was still just a teenager struggling to overcome the rush of emotions that come at this time—Enola was looking at me with madness whirling in her eyes. Her pupils were dilated to such an extent that her normally bright blue eyes became pure black rimmed with moonlight-pale blue. In her arms was the limp body of a strong young man with the build of a football player, looking to be roughly a year or two older than Enola.

Apparently she saw the horror and shock in my eyes, for her own eyes narrowed and she moved to cover my mouth, mocking me as she did so. “Are you going to scream and call for help, Doctor? Will you tell everybody to be brave and face what’s real, and then become a hypocrite when you’re alone?” She spat out the last word, bitterness barely disguised in each syllable.

In a flash, she dropped the body of the boy, and twisted my arm behind my back. I tried to scream, but Enola’s hand clamped down on my mouth even harder, and I could taste blood. “Now, now, be a good doctor and do as I say,” she laughed; it came out oddly high-pitched, considering the low voice she was speaking with. “I would hate to have to hurt you!” She laughed again, a low and nasty chuckle this time.

Someone was whimpering, and I realized that that someone was me. With a wicked smile on her face, she ignored me and forced me down onto my chair, tying my hands behind my back and tying my legs to the chair. She lifted her hand for a single moment, but before I had time to react, she slapped a piece of tape onto my mouth, effectually sealing it for the time being. I closed my eyes to stop the tears that were welling up deep inside me…

Apparently I fainted, for when I next opened my eyes, Enola was pacing the room with a whip in her hands while she poured forth a barrage of questions at the unfortunate boy she had dragged in, who was now tied to a chair as I was. “I hate you, you know that?” Enola was snarling.

“Don’t hurt me…oh God… Please don’t hurt me…” the boy babbled.

“That’s exactly what I said that night, but you ignored me, didn’t you?” she giggled in a sing-song voice. “Why should I listen to you now?” Suddenly, the boy’s eyes caught my own, and they lit up with a sort of savage hope. He mouthed the word help to me, but Enola whirled around to see what he was staring at so frantically and pleadingly. “Ah, you’re awake,” she smiled in satisfaction. “I’d like you to meet my boyfriend, Zane. Zane, this is my psychiatrist. I do hope you’ll be nice to each other now!”

“You’re crazy!” Zane shouted in a spurt of idiocy. “We won’t do anything to each other! We can’t! You bound us up!”

“That’s for your own safety, darling,” Enola laughed, carving a scar in his cheek with her elongated fingernails.

“Let me go,” he pleaded, wincing as scarlet began to run down his face. “Please! We can talk about this, Cheryl!”

I could almost see the strings inside her snapping; Cheryl, Hunapo, and Enola had all been cracking for a long time. Now, with her last thread strained to the breaking point, Enola snapped.

“I am not Cheryl, you moronic slug!” she shrieked, her eyes wide and hands tensed in claws. “No; you have made me so much more than that. You have made me who I am now!” Her voice softened to nearly a coo, but the madness never left her eyes. “Although I never thought I would say this, I have to thank you. You opened my eyes to what must be done to rid this world of such monsters as yourself!” As she screamed out this last sentence, Enola pulled a huge carving knife out from behind her back; from where she obtained such an object, I do not know.

At last, Zane proved that he did indeed have a brain as he began to work furiously on liberating his limbs from their bonds, which he should have begun doing long ago. To my surprise, he managed to free his hands rather easily, and began to work on his legs. All the while, Enola advanced steadily forward. “I will tell you a story of how a young girl was brutally hurt by the one she loved,” she smiled benevolently, as though telling a fairytale to little children. “As I speak, I will slowly carve your skin so that you suffer the same agony the girl suffered.”

Zane did not waste time on useless words and continued to work furiously on the ropes. Feeling that he would not be able to escape before Enola killed him, I tried to scream. Unfortunately, while the tape muffled my mouth, my struggles attracted the mad girl’s attention, and her head whipped around faster than lightning. “Now, now then, Doctor,” she crooned sweetly, putting the knife down onto a table and walking towards me. “I told you not to put up a fuss. I’m terribly sorry for this, but I’m afraid that I must make sure you are no longer a liability. I only came to make up my session, and I do believe I have already done that. There is no need for you to stay any longer.”

With that, her hand slammed the back of my head so hard that I immediately became unconscious. The last thing I remember is Zane springing up triumphantly as his bonds fell at his feet. I pray he escaped, although I do not have much hope of that; Enola drew remarkable amounts of strength from her psychosis, and she could have caught up with him despite his athletic physique. If she did not, good luck to the poor boy and may he have learned his lesson.

Forgotten Wolves

I haven't had time to write many stories but I recently found this story I started a few months before school ended. It isn't written as badly as a couple of my other stories, and I think my writing's starting to get deeper... Anyway, the wolves part intrigues me because I love wolves <3


PROLOGUE

The girl smiled at the woman sitting beside her in the car—her mother. “Will we be home soon?” she asked in a slight British accent.
“You’ve asked that question at least ten times in the past hour, Jamie,” the driver laughed. “We’ll be home in another half hour.” The car was silent for several moments. Then, at length—“Do you really hate Quebec that much?” she asked in a soft voice.
Jamie sighed. “It isn’t that. I just feel so much more comfortable on the island.”
“Is it because of your father?”
“No, Mum. I know you’re a psychologist, but I’m not one of your patients. You can’t treat me like one. I’m different because I’m your daughter. And also… It’s none of your business however much I like Dad.”
Mother and daughter lapsed into silence.
It was a rainy night. The old Volkswagen was running low on gas. There were so many causes for what happened next.
A car swerved out onto the open road, right in front of Jamie and her mother. On instinct, Jamie’s mother turned the car to the right, to avoid the car. She had twisted the wheel too hard.
The car skidded across a thin sheet of black ice.
She struggled to right the car, but in doing so, her efforts turned the car over.
Jamie screamed.
Then there was pain.
Then there was nothing.
CHAPTER ONE

Jamie woke up. She couldn’t remember why she was there. She was covered in bandages. She couldn’t remember where she was.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she turned her head. There was a man, sleeping in a chair, very close to her bed. I’m supposed to know him, Jamie thought, but I don’t. What happened to me?
She tried to ease herself up, but a piercing pain in her head made her shriek. The man beside her bed woke immediately.
There was relief in his eyes, then worry, and finally pain. “Are you all right, Jamie?”
She nodded. “I think so.” I have a British accent, she thought dazedly. Since there was no way to put it off without pain, she asked bluntly, “Who are you?”
The pain in the man’s eyes intensified, and Jamie wished she could take it back. “I’m Dad, remember?” He seemed to choke on the last word. “Do you remember who you are? Why you’re here? Where you are?”
Jamie thought. “My name is Jamie,” she said slowly, “but I’m not quite sure of my last name. I think it starts with a D. I don’t know why I’m here. I think I’m in a hospital. Am I?” The man—my father, she reminded herself—nodded sadly. “Why am I in a hospital? Is there something wrong with me?” She felt oddly panicked. She already knew there was something wrong with her. Why should she be worried? Why was she wasting time asking pointless questions? Did she always do this?
“You were in an accident, Jamie. With your mother.”
Jamie felt dazed, like she was dreaming. “My mother,” she repeated stupidly. “Is she alive?” The man—my father, she reminded herself again—didn’t say anything. “She’s dead, isn’t she.” It was said as a statement, not a question. If she wasn’t alive, she was dead. It was that simple.
He nodded after a long pause. “It must be hard for you,” he said, his voice catching. “To not be able to remember her, I mean. She used to be the most important person in your life.”
“Really?” Jamie was intrigued. She wanted to learn more about this life which apparently used to be hers. “What was she like?”
Her father kept silent for a long time. When he began to talk again, his voice was layered with sadness. “She was a beautiful woman. She was happy most of the time, but when the mood seized her, she could become very withdrawn. She was such an intelligent woman, always hungry for knowledge. The house was filled with all her books.”
“Am I like her?”
“Very much so. You have her eyes and her hair. You have her nose. You look so much like her I can hardly believe it isn’t her. But you’re more emotionally balanced that she was. You liked to write more than to read.” Jamie’s father broke off in the middle.
Jamie kept quiet. She had a question, but she didn’t want to distress him more. At last, she ventured, “Who are you?”
“I’m your father.”
“Yes, you’ve said that. But what are you like?”
“My name is Robert Ma’iitsoh. I’m thirty-seven years old, and I study wolves as a profession. When we go home, there will be thirteen wolves waiting for us. Do you remember them?”
Jamie thought hard. “No,” she answered truthfully. “But…thirteen? Isn’t that how old I am?”
Robert smiled, pleased that she’d at least remembered her age. “Yes. Your mother and I started the project the year you were born. Each year, we add a new wolf.”
“Who are they?” Jamie propped herself up in bed, interested at last. Her father pulled out a scrapbook in his backpack and began to show her the wolves, and how to tell each one apart.
Lakota…Chinook…Cheyenne…Estonia…Gypsy…
Inuktitut…Lakota…Navajo…Shoshone…Tamil…Inupiat…
Lenape…Cherokee…
The names were familiar only because these were the names of Native American tribes, or of some other ethnic group. The pictures weren’t familiar. Eventually, however, Jamie learned to distinguish the wolves. She also figured out how much it hurt her father when she couldn’t remember what apparently had been so important to her before. And so she pretended. She pretended that she vaguely remembered something, or that something seemed familiar. Nothing too promising, since she didn’t want to get his hopes up.
“When are we going home?” Jamie asked finally. She had picked up enough to know that “home” equaled a huge estate that covered acres and acres, filled with a wolf tribe of thirteen.
Robert seemed surprised. “I never thought you’d ask to go to Ontario,” he chuckled.
Jamie looked startled—a mistake. “What?” she asked. “Do I not like to go to Ontario?”
Her father’s face changed, and she immediately knew that she had given away her act of remembrance with that one little question. “You don’t remember, do you,” he said softly. It wasn’t a question. It was a fact. She didn’t remember. And he knew.
“Of course I do,” Jamie blundered. She couldn’t hurt her father this way. Even if she knew him as only a strange man who seemed to care about her, she didn’t want to hurt him. He loved her, apparently, and she wouldn’t hurt those who loved her.
Robert frowned, “No you don’t. Stop pretending just to spare me. I’d rather know what was really going on than to be protected. I’m not a child; I’m older than you are.”
“Age is nothing but a number,” replied Jamie without thinking. She didn’t even know where that had come from.
Apparently, her father did. He went white, and gasped, “You remember that?”
“Remember what?” Jamie was confused.
“Your mother and you used to eat those Dove chocolates all the time, and you’d memorize all those quaint little sayings inside the wrapping. Don’t you remember any of that?”
Jamie shook her head. “It just came out of the blue. I guess it became a kind of reflex.”
“Do you remember her at all?” Robert asked pleadingly.
She thought hard. “I—I remember she was tall, and that’s about it.”

Chix12

I know exactly how I'm gonna write this! I even have one of those back-cover excerpt-thingies!

“Siena? Are you all right?”

I shook myself from the dreamy state I had been in. “Yeah. Just a little tired.” Shuddering, I stood up and wobbled my way to the teacher’s desk. My friend Koa and I were in detention with Mrs. Westerner. “Mrs. Westerner?” I asked. “May I go to the bathroom?” Once the graying lady had nodded, I grabbed my agenda and left the stuffy, claustrophobic classroom.

In the hallways, I began to slow down. I had a few precious minutes of freedom before I was forced to return to that room—that disgustingly hot, horrid room. Mrs. Westerner was a sweet woman, but even that hadn’t stopped her from giving Koa and me detention for talking too much in class. It hadn’t been our fault, though. Casey Barnett had been yakking away about her latest date, and when Koa and I leaned over to tell her to shut up, we got busted.

After going to the bathroom, I was forced to return to my after-school prison. Fortunately, however, Mrs. Westerner soon became “too bored for words”, and we were free to go.

“What was up in detention?” asked Koa as we rode the bus home.

“Huh?”

“You went all psychic on me again. That’s the third time this week. What’s up with you?”

I shrugged and yawned. “Sorry, Koa.”

She looked at me. “Oh, no,” she laughed. “You can’t just get away with an apology! Now you have to tell me what was going on.”

“I was just thinking about Casey Barnett and her boyfriend.”

“Ew. Why?”

I shrugged again, and looked away. “I just wondered what it was like to have a boyfriend,” I said in a small voice. “I know that they don’t really love each other or anything. I know it’s just an act for popularity,” I added quickly. “I don’t want anything like that, though. I want someone who actually respects me and cares about what I think.”

The bus was silent as Koa thought. I was uncomfortably aware of the silence; she and I were the only ones on the bus today, seeing as how it was a Friday. At last, she looked at me. “That’s really deep, you know,” she said calmly and frankly. “But I can see what you mean about the boyfriend part. I wish I had one too.” She shifted her body on the seat. “I mean, we’re already fourteen. Everybody else has a boyfriend.”

“It kind of makes me feel—oh, I don’t know—unwanted.” I looked up at her. “At least you already had a boyfriend,” I grinned ruefully.

“You mean Ross? We were really just good friends. There was never any chemistry between us. We only went out because we wanted to test our relationship. Besides, we broke up after a week.”

“That’s longer than Casey and Rob have been going out,” I laughed. Koa smiled. “But seriously, Koa. What’ll we do about the boyfriend thing? We can’t just go to the dances together like we did all the other years, or just skip out on it altogether. I’m tired of rumors saying that we’re lesbian, but I want to have all these memories of middle school.”

Just then, Carlos, the bus driver, called back to us, “Here’s your stop.”

We got off the bus, and walked towards Koa’s house to finish up our homework. As we did so, Koa’s neighbor, Ross, looked out the window. We were only wearing tank tops and shorts, the day being too hot to wear a t-shirt. He wolf-whistled and called down, “C’mon up to my bedroom, ladies, and I’ll treat you right!” We all laughed. Ross was a bit of a pervert, but he was actually really sweet and nice. To add to his words, he began to do a slight striptease by slowly taking off his shirt.

Koa rolled her eyes. “Bye, Ross,” she called up, and, giggling, we went into her house.

“Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” Ross yelled in a last-ditch attempt to get us to turn around. We just waved our hands back at him and locked the door.

The back-cover excerpt-thingy:

Meet me tonight at Bicentennial Park.

--Chix12

That was what the note said. I couldn’t believe it. Who was this Chix12, anyway? He sure had nice writing. Or was it a she? I didn’t know, that was for sure. And I wasn’t sure how to sneak out of my house at midnight. My parents were mega-strict. Besides, how long was it going to take? What was it about? My head was swimming with questions, with, oh, say, about ZERO ANSWERS!!!


I'm still debating about the end, though. I might just have it turn out to be Koa who was pretending to be Chix12 because she didn't want Siena to feel bad about not having a boyfriend. But for the prom, Ross asks her to be his date because he actually does like her. In that way, it leaves room for a series. Or should it just be Ross throughout? GAHHH I don't know!