The Boarding House

We were suddenly near the door; it was large, okay, large house pretty much equals a large door. But this was insanely large. It must have been at least twelve feet high; it felt like I was stepping into a fantasy castle from an old story, where the heroine became the all too willing lover of the prince of the castle or a willing prisoner. The ones I had been told all had nice endings where they all ‘lived happily ever after’. The ones I had read however, they were more my style. They were the truth. What really happened in those old, dark forbidden castles? Javrhon and I had spent night after night reading the stories and then acting them out with many of our friends the next morning. I had always been stuck with being the heroine, no matter how many times I wanted to be the evil old crone or malicious temptress. Javrhon had always put down my hopes of being more than some pathetic girl running around waiting to be saved because she was too inquisitive for her own good.

And that suited my parents and the other children that played with us fine. Javrhon could always have whatever part he wanted, and it was normally the evil mastermind behind it all. He had been good at it, but even better at being the ‘knight in shining armour’. One year, after having played the damsel in distress one too many times I had stopped playing. I’d retreated into myself and not even Javrhon or my mother could coax me out. Until one fateful night, when Javrhon had pounced on me, torturing me in the only way he knew how, tickling. He had made me confess my troubles and had held me back from either hitting him or tickling him back while he had thought it through. After letting out a small ‘hmph’ that meant he’d thought of a solution to the problem, not having a damsel in distress for two weeks was a huge problem to the play time issue back then, and he wasn’t going to share it with me. He didn’t. Then when I had threatened him, Javrhon laughed, threw me over his shoulder and dumped me on my bed telling me to sleep. That he had it all planned and everything would be fine tomorrow. When I had tried to get up and sort him out for being so stupid as to think that I would listen to him my father had come in to check that we were in our beds. I had received a light scolding as did Javrhon when he chuckled under his breath at my misfortune.

The day after I was determined I wouldn’t play with him. I’d held out this long one more day wouldn’t hurt. Javrhon had realised that this would happen and acted out his solution anyway. He had decided in those ten minutes of torturing me and five minutes of listening to my plights that the best way around me was not casting me as the delicate little flower that needed to be protected every hour of the day and the solution was to leave the fairytales and make up our own stories.

He and a few other boys had pounced on me and on Javrhon’s orders they had tied me up loosely with vines, I snapped out of them easily which only heightened the adrenaline rush of a new game. Soon I was as entangled in this game as they were. This time I was cast as the ferocious leader of an army of warrior women, enemy to Javrhon’s army with a love interest because there always was one in this type of stories. It wasn’t my brother and I, oh no. Even though we were young, I had overheard my mother talking to one of the other girl’s mother. They had been talking about betrothal and how the two children that were betrothed to each other weren’t getting close enough, while playing with us. So Javrhon and I had formed a plot, they would be the love interest; my daughter and the chief general of Javrhon’s army were to fall in love. And they did. They now had their own realm with several children and a very large and powerful army. We still remained friends, they were eternally thankful to Javrhon and I for making them be the lovers so many times that they were used to claiming they shared an emotion that was quite uncommon between the two races.