Chapter 2: Home Alone

A Chapter by CarmenT

When Lydia is home alone she gets very excited to finish her story to enter into the writing contest but a horrible disappointment kills her mood.

Lydia’s best friend Stella was waiting for her by the table set up in the middle of the hall. She knew exactly what it was for. It was the place where you sign up for the writing contest. Stella ran over to her and hugged her really tight. She was usually like that when they greeted each other. She was so tall with her long arms and silky brown hair; it made Lydia feel like she was getting a bear hug.

“So what did your grandmother say?” she asked after letting Lydia go.

She bit her lip. “She said yes,” she lied. Without looking Stella in the eye she casually leaned over the table and searched for a seventh grade signup sheet. She grabbed it quickly and shoved it in her backpack. Grandma Francine never looked through her backpack unless there was some rumor going around about teens with drugs. Francine was very protective of her granddaughter and that was what Lydia was hinting at might be the problem with this.

She never liked lying to her grandmother but sometimes it was the only thing to do when you really believed in yourself.

Stella took off down the hall bouncing with excitement, greeting her other friends. She was always a big bundle of excitement and that’s what Lydia loved about her. She wasn’t the type of friend that gets mad at you for something. Usually Stella just toughs everything out or makes a joke out of it.

Lydia laughed silently and then took off down the opposite end of the hallway to get to her next class. During science class, she slipped out the sheet and started filling it out. She got through almost everything without an issue. She put down her full name, address, zip code, city, country, birth date, and finally she was stumped on the last one. She had to get a parent or guardian’s signature to go on. Filing through all of her papers almost too loudly, she whipped her head up at the teacher when he said her name. He continued on and she went through her papers again. Lydia got out her old field trip form from September’s field trip. Grandma Francine had signed it with her full name. Carefully, Lydia traced the signature onto the form and slipped it cautiously into an envelope. She turned it into the office and the office from there usually emailed the information right away to the writing contest.

That afternoon she ran off the bus to her house, excitedly. This was one of the few afternoons her grandparents let her stay home alone for a few hours after school while they went shopping. With them gone for a while she knew she could finish her story she was going to enter in the contest. It was a short story and it was only two pages long. It had to prove herself worthy of going into the real contest where they can write poems, stories, books, plays, and others. Poems had to be at least eight lines long and everything else had to be at least eight pages long. Lydia, she and everyone else she had known for a while knew, could go way further than eight pages. Some of her longest stories had been almost fifty pages.

Hurriedly, she typed her story and finished page two in fewer than twenty minutes. Her fingers were tingling with excitement. To enter the contest you had to send it by email to the program running it and usually since they are on computers all day reviewing young writers’ writing pieces they answer back in a about half an hour. She clicked send, turned the computer volume up to the maximum volume and then went into the guest bedroom to watch TV until she got a response back.

When she heard a loud beep a while later meaning she got an email she fled into her room and leaped to her computer. There were two emails: one from Stella and one from the writing contest. She decided to wait and check what Stella said. Immediately closing the email when she saw five paragraphs of writing, she opened up the writing contest one. She closed her eyes for about ten seconds and then fluttered her eyes open to see what might have been the most disappointing email to ever receive.

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