Shattering Crystals

I wake to the sound of blaring sirens.

My first thought is that my mother is watching the news again, turning up the volume so that she can hear about the many dangers that I must be sheltered from. But I feel the boards underneath me and realize where I really am.

I sit bolt upright, head spinning as I breathe in the early morning air.

We're done for.

It's my only thought as I shove my sleeping bag into my backpack. There's no time to shrink it and I start running with it still half hanging out, even though I don’t know where to run to. I try to push my now-short hair behind my ears, but it falls back into my eyes.

"Diana!" I hear Lorraine shout from behind me. I jerk myself to a stop and spin clumsily on my bare heel to face her.

"Why are the police here, Crystalline?" I ask, using her former name in a last attempt to conceal our identities.

"I don't know," she says, her eyes widening. She adjusts the straps of her backpack, her sleeping bag sticking out in the same fashion as mine. "I thought you might know. And where's Charles? What time is it?"

"Don't ask me, he's the one with the watch." We walk around the small area, trying to look relaxed, yet jumping at every small sound. How would we respond to a police officer asking us why we are in the park in the early hours of the morning?

And then we spot Dean, sitting at the base of a tall oak tree with a notebook and pencil in his hands. He looks up at us and waves.

"Good morning," he says cheerfully. He motions for us to sit down next to him.

"How can you be so calm?"

"Shh. Sit down."

We sit down, brains fogged up from running before breakfast. I take the time to unpack my bag and slip my shoes onto my dirty feet.

"What are you doing?" Lorraine asks.

"Keeping my cool, unlike you guys," he says, sketching what appears to be a flower on the lined paper. "It's six AM, by the way. We should find something to eat."

"Well, I just want to go back to sleep," I say, leaning back against the wide tree. The sound of voices gets louder as the officers walk closer to us. "It's not my fault your parents made you wake up so early."

The police officers approach as and give us a strange look. It's not really everyday you see some kids awake at six AM in the summertime, and out in the park.

"Hey, kids. What are you doing out so early?" says a big, beefy man. His full, mousy brown mustache moves oddly as he talks and his badge glints subtly in the sun light.

"We, uh..." I say, not sure how to explain our situation. It goes against everything I learned to lie to someone in a position of authority.

"We're drawing what things look like at certain times of day," Dean lies smoothly. He lifts up his notebook to show his scrawled flowers across the page.

"Okay, thanks, kids," the officer says, turning away. "Wait... where are your parents?" he stops, suspicious.

"They're getting food for us. We’re trying this new thing where we all get up early, so we can appreciate the sunrise and stuff like that."

"Alright, stay safe." He walks away, leaving me frozen, as we still don't know why he was in the park. Could someone have spotted us? Our hair is different... but our faces are still recognizable, as we didn't have time to disguise ourselves. Yet if he was really looking for us, he would have realized that we are the runaways...

It’s possible that he could have seen us sleeping on the benches. If he did, he would have asked us about it, though, so it can’t be that. He hadn't recognized us, and he didn’t see us sleeping - so why was he here? My breathing slows as the officers get into their car and drive off. I sigh and pull out my sleeping bag to shrink it. Lorraine does the same.

"I seriously thought we were gonna get caught, and they would take us home," I say to Dean. “It would be just our luck, anyways, to get caught like one day after we leave.”

"Yeah, well, lucky for us, I can get up earlier than you guys and I actually know how to think," he responds.

“How long have you been awake?” Lorraine asks him. “I didn’t even get up this early for school…”

“Maybe like an hour or something. I couldn’t sleep with all the light after the sun rose, so I just got up. And luckily for you, I had the brains to think of a plan in case something like this happened. Which it did.” He opens his bag and puts the notebook in. He gets up off of his sleeping bag, which I hadn’t even noticed before. “Can one of you shrink this for me?”

Lorraine works her quick magic and Dean shoves the sleeping bag into his bag. I look back at the benches, which turn out to be right near the tree, to see if we left anything. We didn’t.

“Let’s go get food or something,” Lorraine says,” her stomach rumbling. “Did any of the places we went to yesterday serve breakfast?”

“There was the diner,” Dean says. He points to a building to our left. “It’s right over there, too.”

“Let’s go then,” Lorraine says, nearly running towards it. Dean follows.

I get up from under the tree to follow them. But as I brush myself off, someone steps out from behind it.