Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Pia chirps at me. A ‘yes’ in her little-bird language. “You’re seven now.”
“Seven.” I am barely even whispering, but of course, my mother, who is driving the car, hears me.
“Are you talking to yourself again? What have I told you about talking to yourself, Pie? You can’t do that here.”
I’m not talking to myself, of course. I’m talking to my Pia. But I’ve explained this to her a thousand times and it just makes her angry. There is no bird! There is no magic! You are nobody!
She will yell this, or growl this, or sometimes even shake me by the shoulders.
So. Fine. There is no magic and I am nobody.
I can agree with that.
But I will not deny the existence of Pia. I will not be the reason that Pia fades to glass.
I know I do not belong here. I know I am not this girl in the car. I know that I was someone else once. I know that I am lost.
I know all these things but I can do nothing about them. The only thing I’m in control of is refusing to deny the existence of Pia.
If I lose her, I lose everything. Forever.
Sometimes I think I’ve already lost it. Sometimes I feel crazy. Mother calls me crazy all the time. But sometimes I just feel like a liar. Did I really come from another world?
For a while I had my clothes. The red and yellow checkered skirt. And the medals, and the ribbons, and the shoes that didn’t really fit. But Mother threw them away months ago and now they are just another smudge in my memory.
And even when I hold Pia tight, and we slip into that other place where the sun shines warm across my cheeks and makes yellow streaks across the inside of my eyelids—it’s fading.
There used to be a castle, and Pia and I would wander empty hallways. There used to be a city too. I would stop on a bridge between two towers and look out across the streets and buildings. It was an empty city. No people. No activity at all. But still, I had it. I had that castle, and those hallways, and those streets.
And now all that’s gone. I can’t see them anymore.
Maybe I made it all up?
Maybe Mother is right and I’m making Pia up too?
Everything is fading and soon it will be nothing but glass.
My mother stops the car and opens her heavy door with a loud creak. A moment later the seat flings forward and she is beckoning me to get out. “Hurry up, Pie. School started an hour ago. You’re late.”
I’m not the one who’s late. She’s late. But Mother doesn’t like to be corrected.
When I don’t move fast enough, she reaches into the back seat, grabs my arm, and tugs me out of the car.
It’s freezing outside. I’m not sure how to count time here in this place—I don’t understand minutes or hours, let alone months and years. And this makes everyone think I’m stupid. This is not my first school. And everyone at the last one called me stupid. Even the teacher called me stupid once. This was the school I went to when we were living in the hotel after my father disappeared.
I know that man is not my father. But what else do I call him? The stranger who kidnapped me from a place with skies the color of silver unicorns?
Anyway. I don’t know what an hour is. I tried to wrap my head around time when the teacher talked about it in last school but every time I asked a question, the kids laughed and the teacher looked at me funny. I would say things like, “Which hour is Earth Hour?”
And that was it. Because the teacher said, “Earth Hour, Pie?” They made fun of my name too, always snickering and calling me different kinds of pie. “Earth Hour? What are you, a baby witch?”
The other kids went wild with fits of laughter. They called me Baby Witch for weeks.
And then… I just gave up on time. So I don’t understand how late we are.
I gave up on everything, really.
I slip as I get out of the car. My boots got left behind in the hotel room. Not the boots I came with—those were shaped funny and didn’t fit—but the ones Mother got me from the store that smells like soup. So I’m wearing sneakers that have a hole in the toe and I fall onto the slick, snow-covered parking lot in front of a building that looks every bit as dingy and sad as the last one I went to.
The cold turns to wet and when Mother yanks me up by my arm, I look around to my backside and realize there is a now a big wet spot on the bum of my soup-smelling pants.