Unleashed

Chapter 1

The harsh tones of the bell snapped Elly of out her daydream and she hastily scraped together her books and papers and slunk out of the classroom.  Hopefully she hadn’t missed anything important when she spaced out—she needed to keep her grades up, Noel would be furious if she got called in for another conference about her dozing stepdaughter.  Scrubbing a hand across her face tiredly, she opened her locker and stuffed everything she needed into her book bag.  Hoisting it onto her shoulder, she headed to the main doors of the school, where bus number nine would be waiting to take her home.

As she passed the doors of the locker rooms in the hallway by the gym, Elly looked wistfully at the girls laughing as they headed inside to dress out for sports practices.  She wanted so badly to join the cross-country team because she loved running, but Noel wouldn’t let her join any school teams.    Any time Elly asked, Noel claimed she didn’t have time to pick up both her biological daughter Bridget and her stepdaughter Elly from after-school practices, since Bridget went to the private college prep school across town from Elly’s public high school.  Every argument Elly brought up was futile, so she had to content herself with finding time to run on her own around her neighborhood, or, if she was lucky, the local park.

Walking outside into the mid-September sunlight was refreshing—for all of the 30 seconds before Elly had to board the bus.  Even though she’d been taking the bus ever since Noel had decided to enroll Victoria in a private school for the sixth grade, she’d never quite managed to get used to it.  It was so loud, the shrieks of over-excited kids felt like needles boring into her eardrums, and the smells—well, Elly preferred not to think too much about where those came from.  And it’s not like complaining would do anything for her; the one time she did mention it to Noel, her stepmom accused her of being overdramatic and selfish, trying to get special treatment over her own daughters.  Maybe when John was still alive, he could’ve convinced Noel to lighten up a little, but John had died 8 years ago from a complication by an undiagnosed heart defect, and Noel had never been the same.  So Elly rode the bus home, and watched the laughing girls going to cross-country practice wistfully, and hoped that someday, maybe, she could be someone a little less boring.

Slinging her bookbag into an empty seat, Elly sat down with a sigh and tried her best to block out the sounds and smells of the bus for the next 10 minutes until at last it would deliver her home.  She was grateful that at least today was Friday, so she wouldn’t have to ride the bus or struggle to keep herself awake in class for two whole days.  Plus, Noel had a meeting in the city an hour away and had decided to make a weekend getaway of it with her new boyfriend, so Elly was looking forward to a weekend of relative solitude and peace.  Rosie and Bridget, her younger stepsisters, both had plans to be at friend’s houses for the weekend, so it would only be Victoria and Elly home alone, and she figured Vic would be too busy hanging out with her friends and binging shows on the TV to bother her stepsister.  The brakes of the bus squealed and Elly winced, wondering how the other kids didn’t seem to be much bothered by the ear-splitting screech and were able to continue chatting away without so much as a pause.  The bus finally lurched into motion again, and Elly tilted her face toward the window and the thin stream of fresh air that whipped in through the window, only open the barest of cracks.  They wound through the streets of town, looping between the various neighborhoods until at last, Elly saw the house she shared with Noel and her stepsisters come into view.  It was a sizeable two-story stone house with a colonial porch shading the front door.  Elly stepped off the bus as it came to a stop at her block, shouldering her backpack as the doors slid shut behind her and the cacophony faded to a dull roar and then nothing as the bus trundled off down the street and turned the corner out of sight.  She trudged up the crescent-shaped driveway bordered by careful flower beds planted the year after they moved into this house, before Rosalia was even born.  Elly could just barely remember the house they lived in before moving here.  It was a much more modest home on a quiet street of town, only one story.  Elly loved how the yard in the back sloped down to a tangle of woods.  It had always reminded her of a cozy cottage on the edge of a fairy-tale wood, but Noel had always been wary of the woods, and had warned Elly and Victoria as they were growing up never to wander too close to the border of the trees while they played.  Then, when Bridget was two years old, John and Noel packed the family up and moved to this house in its nice subdivision neighborhood.  There were enough bedrooms that each girl could have her own without sharing and the fenced in backyard had an in-ground pool, but secretly Elly still missed the house on the edge of the woods.  Even if she did appreciate having her own room, despite it being in the basement with only one tiny frosted-glass window at the top of the wall.  It was still her own space, and she was grateful to have somewhere to retreat from everything else going on and just be with her thoughts—or a good book.  Despite the homework weighing down her bag, Elly was already thinking about the novel she was looking forward to starting, and hopefully finishing, that weekend.  She swung through the kitchen on her way down to her room and saw Noel had left a note on the door of the fridge reminding her and Vic that she would be gone until Sunday afternoon, the phone numbers for the friends’ mothers’ that Bridget and Rosie would be with, and instructions to order pizza or something for dinner and have leftovers from the fridge for lunch.  Elly scanned the note and then grabbed a bottle of juice from the fridge before heading down to her room and tossing her bookbag down by her desk.  She grabbed the novel she’d been looking forward to from her nightstand and flopped onto her bed with a sigh of contentment.  The house was quiet—Vic would be at drama club until 5:30 at least—and Elly quickly sank blissfully into the world brought to life on the pages.