Chapter One

Chapter One

 

Estella Verderame had been content being called ‘Estella’ until she was in the fifth grade and one of her classmates had told her that Estella was an ‘old lady’ name, and at that point she took off the letter ‘e’, simply calling herself Stella. Stella, she decided, was a better name in any case, because it sounded better and was more suitable for a younger girl.

On a bright sunny Tuesday morning when she was fifteen, Stella was anything but bright and sunny. She woke up in a sour mood, looking through her closet for something to wear. Even though her closet was full, she, like most teenage girls, was never completely satisfied. She wished she hadn’t given her favorite pair of jeans to her best friend.

Walking down the stairs in an even worse mood, she sat down at the table, where her little sister was busy chatting with her mother about God knew what.

“When you were my age, you were little, weren’t you?” the little brat said.

“Well, naturally,” their mother said, taking the porridge off the stove. “Good morning, Essie!”

Stella made a face. Ever since she was a baby, her mother had insisted on calling her ‘Essie’, for the first part of her given name. She couldn’t stand the names her mother gave her, or, for that matter, her father, either. Between the two, she was called Essie, Ella, and Ellie. She couldn’t really remember the last time either one had called her ‘Stella’ or ‘Estella’.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said, sitting down and feeling her mood worsen. “My name is Estella. Either call me Estella or call me Stella but don’t call me Essie!”

“You can call me Essie, Mommy,” her little sister, Jean Louise, said. “If Stellie doesn’t want to be Essie, than I can be Essie!”

Her mother smiled warmly, but Stella made a second face at her little sister. “My name isn’t Stellie either. It’s Stella.”

“And it’s not that, either,” their mother said, putting the pot on the table and dishing out servings to her two girls. “It’s Estella. That’s what’s on your birth certificate and that’s what society knows you as.”

“Yet my own parents don’t know me as Estella,” she mumbled. Her mother placed a bowl of porridge before her. For the third time that morning, she made a face and pushed away the bowl. “No, thank you,” she said.

“Don’t be silly, you won’t eat unless you do it now,” her mother said, sitting down to eat herself.

“Well, then, I guess I won’t be eating,” Stella said, drinking her milk.

“Mommy, why doesn’t Daddy eat breakfast with us?” Jean Louise asked, bothering her older sister as always with her never ending questions.

“Because he works the graveyard shift,” Stella said, tired of not only the questions, but the questions that were often repeated.

“He works at the graveyard?” Jean Louise said, frowning.

“You know he doesn’t,” Stella said, putting her head on her arms that were resting on the table. “He works at the jail. He’s the night guard there. He has to make sure no one tries to break out of jail during the night when everyone’s asleep and then he comes home and sleeps and eats during the day while we’re at school.”

“Estella…” their mother warned.

“What would happen if the prisoners broke out?” Jean Louise said, her brown eyes getting wider.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Mrs. Verderame said, trying to restore order yet again.

“Well, duh,” Stella said, rolling her eyes and ignoring her mother. “They’d break into people’s houses and kill them, or they’d rob a bank, or hotwire a car, or whatever they got arrested for in the first place. That’s what they do. That’s why Dad works the night shift. So that doesn’t happen.”

Jean Louise screamed, jumped off her chair, and ran out of the room and up the stairs to her bedroom. The door slammed.

Their mother groaned. “Estella Ranae Verderame, did you have to scare your sister before school?”

Stella hid a laugh, for two reasons. First, her mother, it seemed, had long since given up on trying to get her oldest daughter to stop tormenting her youngest daughter, as it seemed unavoidable. Instead, she was happy when Jean Louise wasn’t frightened early in the day; after lunch or before supper, she thought, was better.

Second, it amused her that her middle name and surname rhymed. Of course, many people couldn’t pronounce Verderame. She had spent much of her school career teaching people that the first two syllables sounded like ‘murder’, and the last like the ending of ‘edamame’, the beans: Verderame.

“Sorry, mother,” Stella said, though she wasn’t really sorry. For the rest of breakfast, her mother eyed her while she ate her porridge.

When Jean Louise reappeared, she was wearing her plaid school jumper over her white button up shirt. Suddenly, the lack of clothing in her closet didn’t bother Stella. She, too, had gone to the private elementary school her sister had attended and did not miss the uniforms when she moved on to middle school. Jean Louise’s black Mary Janes were on the wrong feet. “These don’t feel right,” she said, stamping her feet all the way back to her chair.

“That’s because your feet aren’t in the proper holes, dear,” her mother said, taking the shoes off and putting them on the right feet. “And maybe reconsider wearing socks, okay?” She turned to Stella. “Hurry up,” she said. “Get dressed.”

“It’s pajama day,” Stella lied, only just remembering that she had appeared in her red flannel pajamas.

“No, it isn’t,” her mother said, “I’m on the parent council. I would have known. There are some clean clothes in your closet. I just washed some this weekend.”

Stella groaned, got up, and went up the stairs slowly. She changed out of her top but left the bottoms on. It was high school, she decided. No one would care if she came to school in a mini skirt. Especially not the stupid boys. They’d probably relic it.

“Bus is here!” Jean Louise called happily.

“There’s no way!” Stella called down the stairs, looking at her watch. But when she looked, it did say seven fifteen, the time the bus picked them up for school. Jean Louise would be going to the morning care program, while Stella’s school would be starting soon; they were always the last of the groups of kids being picked up.

Stella ran down the stairs, stepping into her Converse sneakers as she went, and grabbed her purple book bag, yelling, “Bye, Mom!” as she took a five dollar bill off the counter for lunch.

She hopped on the bus tying her shoes and sat down next to her best friend, Harper Spinelli, who preferred to be known by her surname only. Spinelli had her short black hair in a graceful bun, looking as beautiful as always. Stella only wished for some of her best friend’s beauty. All of the boys liked her, though Spinelli claimed she didn’t care about that.

“How are you today, Stella?” Spinelli said, chewing on a loose strand of her hair.

She made a very indistinguishable noise.

“I’m now capable of committing the perfect crime,” Spinelli said happily. “I no longer have fingerprints.” She flashed Stella her fingers, which had been burnt.

“What’d you do now?” Stella asked curiously.

“What didn’t I do is the better question,” she said, smiling and spitting out the hair. “Well, I was helping Mom make eggs yesterday since she had to have deviled eggs when her” - she gagged - “guests arrived.” Spinelli’s mother was an important businesswoman and often, they had guests over at their home for an important function. When this happened, Mrs. Spinelli often left the task of cooking to her daughter.

“But you’re a good cook,” Stella said. “How’d you burn yourself?”

“Well…” she said suspiciously. “It wasn’t, well…how to put this, how to put this…it wasn’t exactly a…an accident that I got burnt. I was sort of hoping…”

Stella laughed. That was precisely why she was friends with Spinelli in the first place, as she always provided a bit of comic relief. And after spending all day with either her family or the less than desirable people at school, she could sure use some.

The bus stopped once more before reaching the school. This was highly unusual, as typically Jean Louise and Stella were the last two to be picked up before it arrived. “That’s odd,” Stella said, craning her neck to see over the rows of head of annoying school children in front of her. “Usually we’re the last stop…and we’re not at school yet.”

Spinelli shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind being late today. I have a math test I didn’t study for and I don’t think my teacher wants me getting another failing grade. I’m starting to get a collection.”

“I doubt you’ve failed once in your life,” Stella said, trying to peer over the heads of the two gossipy girls seated in front of her. “You’ve gotten straight A’s since birth.”

Craning her neck, Stella saw a boy about their age get on the bus that she had never seen before. He had eyes that darted about the scene. They could cut through a person like a knife, right into their very soul; finally, his eyes stopped moving, settling on her, as she was the only one that was standing. After glaring for a moment, he took the seat directly behind the bus driver, which most people usually used for their backpacks and school supplies. He moved them aside roughly, leaning back in the seat.

“Whoa,” Stella said, sitting down again.

When she sat down, Spinelli had a pencil in her lips, a binder in her lap, and a study guide before her, her eyes darting over the page. She did not even want to ask how she got the supplies so fast. “Hmmm?” Spinelli asked.

“New kid,” she said. “Guy. About sixteen. Really…just…whoa.”

Spinelli laughed. “And since when are you interested in boys? You’ve always thought that having a Y chromosome is like having a genetic disease or something.”

Stella shook her head. “You know I don’t like science jokes. They go right over my head.” She thought for a moment. “Don’t girls have Y chromosomes?”

Spinelli said nothing, knowing fully well that girls, in all actuality, did not have two opposing chromosomes. “Doesn’t matter. Just what’s the deal with the new kid? What’s special with him?”

“We made eye contact,” Stella said.

“And, wait, lemme guess. There were fireworks. You felt like Cinderella but instead of a fancy blue dress you’re in your nicest pair of blue jeans. You feel like you should be singing a sappy love song and you feel like spinning around in circles all day long.”

“I’m not even wearing blue jeans, Miss Romance. And no. It was like…like there’s something not right with him.” As Stella was talking, she had just been realizing that all she was saying had actually been true. When she and the new kid met, sparks didn’t fly like her best friend suggested. Rather, it felt as though he was boring into her soul. It felt as though he knew her deepest secrets…and somehow she knew he was harboring one. “It was so weird. Have you ever felt like someone just cut into you…by looking at you?”

“No,” Spinelli said, quickly doing an algebraic equation on her review sheet in half an attempt to finish before the bell rang. “I can’t say I’ve ever felt that euphoria.” From her tone, she used the word lightly.

“Big words confuse me. You know that,” Stella said, trying to work out what exactly ‘euphoria’ was. “English, please?”

“Well, actually, euphoria has Latin roots, so it’s sort of like English.” She smirked.

“I didn’t ask for the dictionary,” Stella said, getting angrier by the second. “Okay, forget it. You won’t tell me. Cool. But that kid…he just…he’s…”

“Out with it,” Spinelli said impatiently. “English. You speak it?”

“I don’t even know the right adjective to describe him,” she said. “I don’t know. Spooky. Reserved. Odd. Missed Halloween.”

“I think the last one’s good. But I’m more of a fan of dia de los muertos myself.” She glanced over the worksheet, sighed, and said, “I don’t think I’ll be getting any farther on that.”

“It’s done,” Stella pointed out. She barely registered that dia de los muertos meant ‘Day of the Dead’ in Spanish. While Spinelli was not natively a Spanish speaker - she was born in Korea and adopted by her parents - she was very interested in learning about the world. Though she was adopted young, she was very fluent still in Hangul, the language of Korea. She also found the tradition of celebrating deceased loved ones, Day of the Dead, important enough to recognize it more than Halloween. “But you don’t even care about what’s going on with me.”

“Because it’s just another kid like us,” she said. “He just wants to fit in, doesn’t he? I did when I moved here.” Spinelli also had lived in Virginia before her parents relocated her to Oregon. “And I didn’t appreciate people saying that I ‘missed Halloween’, either.”

“No, but when you first showed up…” Stella mumbled, shook her head, and started over. “It’s weird, though. Why is he being picked up on his first day? I’d so have my mom take me to school if I was a new kid. At least to fit in for the first day.”

“Maybe his parents work,” Spinelli suggested. “I figured you’d understand that and all, what with your dad’s job.”

Stella disliked being reminded that her dad was a night guard for a prison. She knew fully well what his job was; she didn’t need reminding. It was like picking a fresh wound whenever someone reminded her, too. She disliked being unable to see her dad all the time; she would much rather prefer he be there for her and Jean Louise, even if she was a little brat more than half the time. Luckily, she had some recollection of her dad before he took on the night job, but Jean Louise was little then. She didn’t remember Daddy carrying her piggyback to school or staying up late with her when there was a monster in her closet. Those were memories Stella had that her little sister wouldn’t.

"Hey, Stel, we’re at school,” Spinelli finally said, gathering her belongings. “School. Riveting, isn’t it?” She stood, forcing Stella to stand, too. “Well.” She brushed herself off and sighed. “Back to the old grind.”

Author's Note

Ignore the obvious grammar issues. It's for NaNoWriMo. Writing a 50K book in a month isn't easy.

Reviews

[Sophie]

Oh my gosh, I know I commented on the preface but I just love this! Please continue to write more!!!