Sweet Escape

Books had always been sort of a safe haven for me. It’s not that my life was particularly terrible but it wasn’t wonderful. I was in a huge family; I was the middle child in a family with eleven kids. My parents were divorced and I rarely got to see my mom. I lived with my dad who was remarried and had custody of all of my brothers and sisters. My step mom wasn’t mean but she wasn’t nice either, she basically tried to ignore us as much as possible. I was one of the last priorities for attention at thirteen I was old enough to take care of myself but not old enough as to where I didn’t need attention from my father.

I was sitting in my room that I shared with two of my sisters. They were both currently down stairs talking with the rest of the family. I was sucked into a world that wasn’t my own. I hadn’t eaten today and I didn’t feel the need to eat if I read all day. I was on my last book and would have to make trip to the book store. I finished my book and sighed adding it to the growing pile of boos beside me. I had bookcases but they were full, so I had resorted to stacking them in teetering piles around the room.

I stood up and grabbed my wallet checking for any money. I spent all of the money my mom sent me on books. She sent each of us eight hundred dollars a month. I wasn’t sure where she got the money from but I didn’t question it. I was down to a hundred dollars and there were two weeks left in the month. I would have to start pacing myself, I thought. I pulled my shoes on and looked at myself in the mirror. I was tall for my age standing at five foot seven inches. I was gangly and awkward with dull brown hair that didn’t reach my shoulders. I was wearing a simple white dress and grey tights. I started down the stairs and was almost out the front door when my oldest sister stopped me.

“Hey Peyton, where are you headed?” She asked me. She didn’t take her eyes of the laptop that was sitting on the table before her.

“Uh I’m going to walk to the bookstore Elise.” She just nods her head and I open the door heading down the street. It was a used bookstore but the books were good enough for me. They didn’t smell like new books but they did have a particular smell. If you’ve never smelled a book before you might think I’m crazy. But used books and new books have a completely different smell. I was thinking of all the possibilities that the money in my wallet held.

Finally I reached the book store and walked into the door, a bell jingled happily as I entered the store. I headed straight for the back of the store where all the best books were kept. But before I could reach my little oasis I ran right into someone’s back. I looked up from my spot on the floor and was met with the image of a beautiful girl wearing a lacy blue dress. She had black hair and cool grey eyes. She seemed confused by her surroundings. And I was confused as to how she had gotten there; I could’ve sworn the small isle had been empty three seconds earlier. She had prevented me from reaching my sweet escape.

“Where am I?” She asks with an accent I couldn’t name. She looked like she was from another time; she had on a lacy light blue dress, white gloves, and weird shoes. Her hair was in intricate curls that you didn’t see in this time. She was holding an old book in her right hand, it had worn pages and was in worse shape than any other book in the store.

“You’re in Boston’s Used Books.” I state standing up and wiping my hands on the seat of my dress. I start to move past her but she moved in front of me with a swift step. I look down at her; she is at least three inches shorter than me.

“Maybe I did not word that correctly, when am I? What is the date?” Her accent was starting to get a little annoying. I look past her trying to see escape. My books were sitting there waiting for me behind this annoying little girl. Actually to be honest she was sort of interesting and more than likely older than me.

“It’s August twentieth.” I say in an off tone trying to get past her. Once again she is in front of me, looking as confused as ever.

“What is the year?” She asks her hand held the book out toward me. I looked down at it, it might’ve had a title at one point but now it was faded away. It had rubbed off over the years. It was clearly older then she and I combined.

“It’ 2010, now will you please let me pass.” I look her in the eyes and she looks at me slightly offended for a second before stepping to the side and letting me through. I walk around her and am almost to my books when I feel something hit my back. I stumble and turn around wondering who had hit me. The girl is standing there still her hands held high above her head as loose pages fly around her head and around her hands. My eyes widen and I quickly scurry backwards and hit the shelves of books behind me.

“What’s happening?!” I scream over the wind trying to move but finding myself unable. The once innocent looking girl now looked wild with her hair flying around her and her eyes wide and jaw set. She was powerful and she knew that she could take me any day. I saw what she had thrown at me; it was the book she had been holding. It was laying on the floor its pages flipping open in the wind. I stared at it for a moment wondering why it wasn’t flying around and losing its pages like the other books.

“You’re going to be stuck just like I was. Stuck in a world you thought you loved.” I look at her as her voice screeches over the air. She moved her arms so her hands are aimed at the book in front of me. Suddenly it starts to shake; it lifts off the ground and hovers before me. In a second the wind changes from pushing me against the wall to pushing me toward the book that was hovering at eye level. Suddenly the yellowing pages turn to the bright blue of a sunny day’s sky. I dig my heels into the rug trying to stop myself but there is no point.

I am flung forward my face getting closer to the book; I close my eyes scrunching up my nose. I don’t know why I do; I mean the least of my worries should’ve been the book hitting my face. But none the less that’s what I was preparing for. When nothing happened I opened my eyes and saw that I was flying, soaring through the air as weightless as a feather, the book that was once in front of me now in my hand. I was slowly getting lower to the ground and right as I was about to land I rolled in the air and land on my back. My shoulder skidding into the ground, when I stop I open my eyes to the leaves of the tree above me. Light is shining through them and blinding me. My shoulder is aching from being rammed into the ground. I sit up my head spinning and my mind racing, this couldn’t be real.

I pinched my arm as I walked around on the green grass. My mind was racing on the fact that I was in a book. As far as I knew I wasn’t even in the United States anymore. God I could be in a whole new world. With that thought a lot more possibilities opened up to my mind. I could be in any number of books. But I knew what books was in, I was in this book, the book I held in my hands. I quickly opened it and looked through the pages; they first fifty or so were filled with tiny font. It looked like I had been typed with a type writer. But after the first fifty pages the book was blank.

Except that the pages were filling slowly. They were saying what had just happened. Everything from me walking into the book store till now, it was talking about me reading the book that was writing about me reading the book. It was sort of confusing and hard to understand as the book typed up exactly what I was thinking. I closed it immediately my eyes wide and my hands shaking. This was my own world; I could mold it how I wanted. I smiled and closed my eyes bringing in magic and love and turning it into an island so I was surrounded by the ocean I was never allowed to see. I brought in people that could teach me magic, superheroes, and talking animals. When I opened my eyes I was sitting in the middle of an amazingly intricate cabin, dressed in a bathing suit with everything I could ever possibly need around me. I ran out of the cabin towel in hand and right onto the sand of the beach.

When I had made all of the good things in my world I didn’t know that it would automatically make the opposites of everything I had thought up. My world was not only filled with amazing magic and love and animals that could talk. I realized in that first day that it was filled with evil magic that could kill people. There were evil villains to face my superheroes. For every person that loved someone there was someone else that hated them. My world couldn’t just teeter on the edge of perfect, no it apparently had to be balanced regardless of how I wanted it.

This world was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I could make multiple moons, or millions of stars, or shooting stars falling into the ocean and turning into angel fish, or aurora borealis lighting up the skies. But after what seemed like a few days I started to miss my family, but in the real world it could’ve been more than a few years. For all I knew it could’ve been hundreds of years and my family, what did my family think.