Free Series – Kindred Home

I would rather be anywhere than in this car right now. I don’t even like long car rides when we’re going somewhere fun like a vacation or something and now we’ve been driving for at least twelve hours. Mom has been in the driver’s seat, glancing back at me ever so often, with hope smeared across her face, through the rear view mirror while I silently read, returning her gaze with resentful glares.

We got out to stretch but we haven’t talked. She has understood and respected that I don’t want to talk to her right now, but her eyes have been begging me to say something, anything. Finally, I break the silence, “How many more sad little houses do we have to drive past before we reach ours.” She beams, “We’re almost there, hon. Why don’t you give this new place a chance. I loved living here when I was your age. I wish I had brought you to visit when your grandmother was still with us. We didn’t get along too well, but she would have loved you and I think you would have liked her, too.”

I scoff and we don’t say anything for the remaining seven minutes, which feels three hours long… Mom smiles as she says, “We’re here, Leo. Not so sad and little, is it?”, as if she’s proven me wrong. As if I could ever love this place more than home. Then we approach and I watch as autumn leaves fall from the rows of giant trees which line the driveway. In the distance, there are sunflowers lining a forest which seems to be part of the property and there is a pond with ducks waddling about. Through the leaves, I begin to see stone. A tall and whimsical structure faces us.

This house is the size of our entire condo building and looks like it came straight out of one of my fairytale books. I stare at it. It is beautiful but I still miss our apartment in Chicago and I refuse to let Mom see me wonder at any of it. As we get out of the car, she grabs my shoulders and says, “Listen. I hope you take advantage of all this space. There is a lot to explore here and we won’t have a TV for a bit so be a kid and run down the halls, cause a little trouble in the pond or something, but give this place the benefit of the doubt.” I blink, seeping reluctance.

She sighs, “You can pick any room on the second floor, okay? Mine will be on the third floor so I won’t be too far.” I stomp past her, crunching leaves beneath my feet. Inside I open every door to every dust-filled, cluttered room on the second floor and hate them all until I reach the room at the end of the hall. It has an old pink door which I open to find a perfectly clean bed, a half-open window, a lamp and a bedside table with tissue paper and a chest the size of a shoebox on it.

I sit on the bed and cry. I want to go home. I think about begging Mom to take me back, but know she won’t budge. She can’t. I reach out for a tissue paper to wipe my eyes. Stretching over, my arm bumps the chest to the floor. It cracks open to reveal a green book with the initials FM engraved on the leather cover. As I lean down to pick it up, the room goes quiet and all is still. I can’t even hear the wind through the window. Excitement stirs within me. Who’s book is this?

To be continued…

I stare at the book for a while when I pick it up. I inspect every detail. It feels so familiar but I know that I have never seen it. It smells old and warm like ginger and cinnamon. I would open it if it weren’t for the lock on its side. Maybe this is a journal? I need to figure out a way to open this book so that I can find out what’s inside. I smile for the first time since leaving Jenny, my only friend at school. She would love how mysterious this all is and would have given the book a silly name by now. Something like Jeremy or Julia, a J-name, for sure.

I proclaim, “You will here on forward be named Jenny 2 after the coolest girl I’ve ever known!”

“Leonna?” My mother interrupts, opening the door, “What’s going on in there. Could my daughter be having fun all of a sudden?”

I shove the book into my backpack, which is open on the bed and yell, “Stay out! Go away.”

She doesn’t say anything for a bit. She looks at me with big sorry eyes but she is the one to blame for bringing us here so I don’t care that she is upset. She comes in and says “I had a feeling you’d pick this one. This is a special room, Leo. You know your grandmother taught me…” Her thought is cut short as she notices the open chest on the floor. “What is that?”, she asks, “Did you bring this here? What was in it?”

“It was like that when I got here,” I lie. I’m not going to let her take the one thing that has made me smile all week.

She picks the chest up with a worried look. Is she worried about me or about what was in the box?

She walks towards me, puts her hands on my shoulders and says, “Let me know if you see or hear or feel anything strange, okay Leo? This is an old house and I know you don’t want to hear about it but it holds a lot of history and even more secrets. Try to get some rest tonight. I’ll see you in the morning, champ.” She smiles tenderly, ruffles my hair, which I hate and walks out of the room.

What secrets could a house keep? I thought only people could do that. I bet Jenny 2 could tell me! I need to figure out a way to open her up. I wonder if Mom knows about her. I wonder what secrets mom knows about the house.

Tomorrow I will search the other rooms for the key! It has to be somewhere. It just has to.

To be continued…

I know that I said I hated all the rooms on the second floor except mine but the other ones aren’t so bad, really. Right now, the room I hate the most is whichever my mom is in. Currently, that’s the kitchen where she is making me perfectly cheerful sunny side up eggs to compensate for the fact that I was upset to be taken away from my exploration of the house which SHE encouraged.

Last night, I decided to begin hunting for clues about the green book I found and the house’s secrets. So, when I got up this morning, I began on the second floor. I diligently inspected each wall, each dresser drawer, each bookshelf, each nook and each cranny. I was beginning to feel like some sort of Nancy Drew, a real Sherlock Holmes! That is, until I heard my mom shout, “How do you want your eggs, Leo?”. I told her I wanted them “for lunch” but she didn’t think that was very funny so my investigation was cut short.

While the investigation was fruitful, to some extent, I feel like I’ve only touched the surface. I’m wasting my time down here when I should be going through all the weird stuff I found (and quickly hid in my room) before being ushered downstairs: a crinkled plan of the house, a silk scarf with the innitials FM embroidered on the end and a small key.

My mother’s voice interrupts my reflection, “Leo, please eat your breakfast. We can’t be late to meet Mrs. Propski.”

She is the principal of Stoneridge Academy, the all-girls private school she wants to force me to go to and just so happenned to attend when she was young.

“That’s today? We just got here.”, I retort despite already knowing.

“I know that you don’t want to be here and I know that you miss Jenny but I am putting my foot down about this. We are visiting the academy today. The only reason we are even getting this meeting with Mrs. Propski is because I’m a former student. The school year starts in 3 days and I don’t know what I’ll do if they don’t accept you at Stoneridge, Leo.”

I say nothing as I finish my breakfast. I feel tears swelling in my eyes. Usually, I’d want my mom to comfort me but I am still upset with her for uprooting my life.

As I make my way up the stairs, I hear her call out, “be ready to leave in twenty minutes, okay?”

I sigh my answer out, “Fine. But I’m not going to wear a dress or anything.” When I get back to my room, I gasp. Jenny 2 is glowing, and so is the key!

To be continued…

The glow coming from the objects is so warm and bright that it softens the shock of it being, well, a glowing book and key. This must mean that the key I found will open Jenny 2.

As I walk towards the bed, the sounds of wind and flute emerge from the silence. I’m surely just imagining it but it sounds so real. I can almost feel the wind. I pick up the key. It is warm in my hand and I am not sure if it is I or it which moves us towards the book’s lock. The key goes in, a perfect fit. It opens on the bed. Like an accordion, the pages flip over themselves, suddenly stopping on the last page. It is handwritten… in cursive… which I cannot read.

My mother’s voice rings through, “Leo, you better be dressed now, we’re leaving in five!”. The book starts to close on itself. I reach for it quickly but all I manage to do is give my index finger a papercut. The book is closed. The wind and flute are gone. There is no glow to be seen.

My mother knocks on the door which she opens, not hearing a response. Her voice echoes in the now silent air, “I’m sorry Leo, I’m trying to be patient and give you your space but if you don’t come down and get in the car now, we will be late and Mrs. Propski might expel you before you even get accepted”.

Her attempt at a joke infuriates me. I know that the book shut itself because of her. I yell through now flowing tears, “I don’t want to go to your stupid academy and you can’t burst into my room like that– get out!”.
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath in. When she opens them, I realize that she is seeing me with the book, the key, all of it.

She says, “why do you have that book?”. The silence is tense. I don’t know what to say. She insists, “How did you get that book, Leo?”.

I barely finish saying that, “I found it in my room”, before she lunges towards me and rips the book out of my hand, irritating my papercut. “Get in the car”, she snaps, “we’ll talk about this after the meeting”.

She puts the book in her purse and stomps down the stairs. I dry my tears and grab a bandaid from my backpack. I wrap my finger up and shove the rest of the items (she was so fixated on Jenny 2) under the bed, just in case.

As I walk down the stairs, I don’t know how to feel. There is so much going on. I am anxious for this stupid meeting with Mrs. Propski and I am frustrated that I no longer have Jenny 2. That being said, I suppose I am mostly confused. My mom has only ever yelled at me a handful of times but never in such a personal way. Something major is going on with that book and my mother knows more than she is letting on. She’s trying to keep me from something and I plan on finding out what that is by the end of the day.

As our car passes the intimidatingly grand gates to Stoneridge Academy, my mom and I speak to each other for the first time since she yelled at me.

She sighs, “I love you, you know? I moved us up here because I thought it would be good for you… so you could have a fresh start. I know you miss Jenny but maybe here you can make new friends. You could, God help me, be a normal kid here?”

The words normal kid linger in the air like a puff of smoke. I know I’m not normal. I’ve always had what my mother likes to call quirks. For instance, I’ve always had this strange affinity with animals. Cats, dogs, insects, fish, you name it. But this year, a family of raccoons took a liking to me and things got bad at school. They’d come to rest on my lap and play with us. I liked them and Jenny certainly didn’t mind. She thought they were cool! But other kids started to call us names. We quickly became known as the grade 6 ‘Garbage Girls’. As the year went on, the bullying intensified. At the end of the year, Jenny’s parents decided it was best for us to be split up in school contexts, that it would be better for their daughter if my image no longer rubbed off on their daughter’s.

I grit my teeth as I answer, “It isn’t my fault they didn’t like me. I– let’s just get this over with.”

She attempts to smile as she prods, “ Leonna, this town is really special. Just give it a try. You haven’t even met any students yet.”

Suppressing tears, I manage, “It’s not like it’ll be any different with these kids than back home .”

“Okay”, she says.

We continue in silence, opening our doors and walking towards the school’s giant arched entryways until we are halted by a girl my age. She is staring at us with such enthusiasm, I think she might burst. Her perfectly pressed blue uniform contrasts beautifully with her curly brown hair. Her wide grin highlights her perfect teeth as she speaks. “You must be Leonna Martins. It is so nice to meet a new student! We don’t often get new students, you know? They are only admitted through referral. You are the lucky one, aren’t you?”

There is a pause. I do not know how to answer. I finally follow with, “Thanks.”

My mother sighs and says “Thank you for the wonderful greeting, Kaylee. We are looking for Mrs. Propski’s office. Can you take us there?”.

“Yes, hello– that would be me,” she said, “you haven’t forgotten what kind of school you’ve signed your child up for, have you?”

And with that, she turned into a woman at least two times my height and said, “follow me”.

My mother and I follow Mrs. Propski through the large doors and down the seemingly never ending halls of the school. Each centimeter of the walls is covered with fantastical paintings, photos, lockers, shelves, magical looking trinkets, whosits, whatsits and gothic you-name-its. I look back at my mother every few steps, quite frankly, in awe. I try to hide the wonder on my face but I know she sees through it. She is smiling ear to ear. A book on one of the walls says, “Oh, a new one. Look!”

The rest of the books hum, haw, cheer and attempt to verbally interact with me. I am bewildered.

“Don’t mind them Leonna,” Mrs. Propski said, making a sharp turn into her office, “the books haven’t had anyone to speak to since the spring term.”

We sit down in silence for a minute, Mrs. Propski looking me up and down, until my mother says, “Thank you for agreeing to meet with us. I loved my experience here as a girl and think Leonna will be a perfect fit.”

“It is difficult to integrate a child of Leonna’s age into our school,” Mrs. Propski answers. “Most students begin their training at the age of 14 or 15. That is when the gifts usually present themselves to young girls, as you know… Have the gifts visited you, child?” Confused, I began to ask, “Gifts? What do you–”

“You haven’t told her about the gifts?” interrupts Mrs. Propski, offering a stern look to my mother. “Give me your hand”, she says to me in a warm and even, no nonsense tone. She takes my hand with hers, turning my palm skyward. She takes out a small vial of turquoise liquid and pours the contents into my palm. As the drops land, they solidify and unsolidify, oscillating between states but never quite becoming liquid again. Mrs. Propski looks straight into my eyes and says, “have you ever felt different, Leonna? Have you ever felt like you were able to do, hear or feel things others couldn’t?” I feel as though she can see inside my soul and as I feel this, the turquoise substance solidifies and begins to glow in my palm.

All I manage to say is, “Whoah!”

She says, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

My mother asks, “Does this mean you’re taking her as a student this semester?” “School starts in 3 days, better get her up to speed before she begins, Madeline,” answers the principal. “Here is her schedule and a list of required materials for the semester. See you on Monday, Leonna. I think you are going to fit in just fine here. People tend to like weird kids here.”

She flashes a smile as she gets up out of her seat, reminding me that she is the tallest person I have seen so far in my life, and walks us back to our car. She and my mother speak about logistics and paperwork and all I can think is, what am I? A wizard? A freak? How could my mom keep this from me? And… maybe she’s cooler than she’s been letting on. But, all I know for sure is that I am definitely about to start an interesting chapter and that maybe someone at this school can help me uncover the secrets of Jenny 2!

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