Chapter 1 let the journey begin

June the seventeenth. The sun was high, in a crystal blue sky and there

were no clouds at all. A true summer day. And as any other equally

respected summer day, June the seventeenth was hot as an egg frying in a

pan. “A frying egg” Easy thought. “I feel exactly as a frying egg”. She was

hanging around, sweating, under the glass ceiling in the central station,

where the Holiday Express train was waiting her at Gate 12 in half an hour.

It was the sixth summer she was going to spend with Aunt Jo in New York.

Of course, Boston �" New York was a long journey that took almost four

hours by train and six by car, but Easy was used to it. As she was making her

way through the crowd with her eight-pound-heavy trolley, looking for an

empty bench to sit on, the frightening call Aunt Joe made her once popped

in her mind.

“*yaaaawwn* who is it?” It was three o’clock in the night, and Easy was just

eleven by that time, but Dad always taught her to answer the phone

whenever it rang: it could’ve been important.

“I-Isabella? Hello dear, uhm, how are y-you? ‘A-am Jo, your auntie!” her

Italian accent always strong and clear.

“Aunt, is something wrong?”

“No no, why should it be so?! I was just thinking to call ya and I called!”

There was something freaky in her voice, as every time Aunt Joanne was

having one of her crisis, and Easy stood up on her bed trying to focus and

calm her Aunt.

“Aunt, I’ll be right back, just let me call Dad, of course you’d want to talk to

him” no one phones me, except in case it’s for Dad, she thought.

“No! No, dear I-I want to talk to you! Only you!” and that’s how she invited

her to spend the whole summer with her in New York, as she was feeling

depressed and lonely in that stupid-empty-junky house, as she defined it

later to Dad the following morning when he called her back.

The truth was that Auntie had had Uncle by her side for about twenty-five

long years, during which they loved each other and that stupid-hollowjunky

house a lot. They were like peanut butter and jelly, like tea and sugar

and never did something alone: they were always stick-together.

But suddenly Uncle Reginald died for something called “thrombus” �" a

weird name for such a deadly thing, Easy thought, and since then Aunt Joe

never recovered really: she constantly went in and out of periods of

depressions and calm, and when she was depressed she was dangerous;

not for the others, but for herself.

Her brother, Easy’s Dad, was aware of it, and as soon as her eleven-yearsold

daughter told him that Auntie has invited her to stay with her, he

allowed her to go, for “someone to cheer you up in dark times is always

welcome” he thought.

A boy looking like a hippy-weirdo, carrying a guitar and a heavy back-pack,

sat next to Easy on the bench and woke her up from her memories. He

offered her a wide smile, showing his straight teeth, but his breath smelled

so bad it made Easy turn away fast.

However, he wasn’t the only one carrying an instrument: Ease carried with

her -as always- her violin. It was a really nice one, made of Mahogany wood

and with an intense hazelnut color. But the very best of it was when she

pressed her cheek on it, rubbed the arch on the strings, pressing them with

the tips of her fingers and produced the most beautiful sound she could

ever think of. And as she waved her arm with vehemence, and closed her

eyes, she could feel her hands melting, becoming of wood too. Her mind

would dance, entering a world of fantasy, a world made of clouds, roses,

light tunes and melodies with sparkling colors changing tonality from

electric blue, to delicate pink, to ivory, to deep red, all in harmony and

swifting with the music she was playing.

Twenty minutes passed, and Easy began to move through the waiting hall

toward Gate 12. Outside, next to the metal railways, it was hotter than

inside, but she was comforted by the idea that in the train she’d have found

a nice, comfy seat under a cool air conditioner.

She quickly found her wagon, and she happily found it empty: her father

always recommended her to “take the seat next to the window, so to see

the trees walking faster than we do”.

So she put her trolley and violin up on the shelf above her, and collapsed in

the soft seat that seemed an armchair. Step by step, the wagon and then

the train filled completely, with chatty, hurried, worried, happy and weird

people, among them the stinky hippy who smiled to Easy, and she prayed

he wouldn’t end in her same wagon. Fortunately, he didn’t.

The officer blew his whistle so forcefully Easy thought for one moment he

was the scary wolf of the three little pigs’ tale, which blew his breath over

each of the three brothers’ houses to take them off. Dad used to tell her

this tale every night when she was younger, and she missed him so much.

She really wished he could be on the sidewalk, waving at her, among the

crowd of people saying goodbye to their relatives and friends on the train.

But he wasn’t. He had too much work to do, and she understood it.

The officer now yelled the famous sentence: “All aboard!” and the train

moved, starting Easy’s long journey.

Author's Note

First chapter first time writing