Imagined into being the.., p.1
Imagined Into Being: The Chronicles of Quinn Book 2, page 1
Imagined into Being
Qatarina & Ora Wanders
Copyright © 2023 by Qatarina and Ora Wanders, Wandering Words Media
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Contents
1. Old & Boring
2. Getting Away with Murder
3. Push Harder
4. The Fight
5. Pushing to the Limit
6. No Ice Cream
7. Stay Out of the Basement
8. Thump
9. Grounded
10. The Narrator
11. Grandpappy's Storybook
12. The Invite
13. The "Party"
14. Then it Got Awkward
15. Once Upon a Time
16. At a Loss
17. The Missing Ballerina
18. Quiet & Empty
19. No Mouth
About the Authors
Also By The Authors
Old & Boring
In this world, there were a few things I knew to be a fact.
One. This town? It was small, it was old, and it was boring.
Two. My grandparents? They were weird, they were old, and they were boring.
Three. The dolls all over this old manor house? Creepy. Old. Boring.
There was a trend there, I had come to realize, and it wasn’t the kind of trend that someone my age wanted. But, like all trends, someone else started it and now I was stuck being pulled along for the ride.
With a groan, I rolled onto my stomach and shoved my head into the pale-yellow casing of my pillow. I groaned a second time, letting the fluff and fabric muffle the sound. I even went so far as to kick my feet against the mattress, just because I could.
Unfortunately, none of my groaning and kicking could change the fact it was Monday morning, and I would have to start school soon. It also didn’t change the fact that my grandmother was knocking on the bedroom door.
“Quinn,” she called in. “You must have forgotten to set your alarm!”
Ugh. Was it really time for school already? I wished I could rewind the clock and just lie here for a while longer.
“I know it was a long weekend,” Grandma went on. “Come down and get something to eat though, alright? I’m sure it’ll make you feel better.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” I grumbled into the pillow. It was too low for her to hear; my Grandma wasn’t deaf, per se, but like all old folk, her hearing sure wasn’t the best, either.
I only felt a little mean for it, too. Over the weekend, Grandma had made a huge effort to try to get to know me better. Not the me that she had formed in her head based around what it had been like raising my dad, but the actual me.
Someone who she had started to invite out to do the gardening with her—it was too hot for me, but the offering part was cool—and whose paper-towel doodles she had complimented twice.
It didn’t fix anything, and it was coming about two months late for it to mean anything, but… I was trying to let myself appreciate it all the same. Old people got more allowances with things. That’s what I figured, at least.
It would have been different if they were my own age. But they weren’t.
They were weird, and old, and boring. And I had to find a way to make that an okay thing. I sighed and rolled out of the bed. “I’m coming, Grandma. I’ll be down for breakfast in a few minutes.”
“Alright, dearie.” She lingered for a moment, and then retreated. It sounded like she was humming something under her breath—a real song. I’d never heard her do that before. She must have been in a good mood.
I could hear her footsteps retreating down the hallway. Once she was totally gone, I hauled myself out of the bed and went to grab my school uniform. It was kept in the closet, along with… My gaze slipped down to the pile of dolls on the floor.
Alice. May. Trevor. Nameless Hero. Mr. Tart. Mrs. Harringbone.
Six dolls, staring up at me.
“I don’t understand why you won’t stay covered,” I told them, grabbing the blanket off of the floor and throwing it over them once more. I did this every morning, and by the next day, the blanket was always slipped straight back off and onto the floor.
It must have been the mice.
This house had a terrible mouse problem. I could hear them at night, moving around under the bed. Grandma swore the mouse problem was a lie she had made up to keep Gramps out of the basement—but I knew better.
And I was careful, too. I made sure to kick at the blankets and the dirty laundry piled up on the floor before shuffling into the closet, not wanting a mouse to scurry out of them and over my toes.
The uniform was a knee-length black-and-red-plaid skirt, with a black polo shirt. The ‘H’ emblem of the academy was just beneath the left fold of the collar. I had been enamored with it when I first got the outfit two months ago, but now… It was just like everything else in my life.
Stuffy. Boring. Old.
It didn’t even look like it came out of this century, and it certainly wasn’t something you expected artists in Texas to wear. It was kind of ugly, too. The colors made the mostly healed-up bruise on my temple stand out. It was an ugly yellow splotch, washed out like waning evening sunlight peeking through storm clouds.
I glanced down.
The blankets had not moved. The dolls were fully covered. I wished they could stay that way; the one lone piece of proof that my dream had not been just that, that it had not all been in my head.
I’ve never seen these dolls before—that’s what Grandma had said late on Friday night, the full moon shining in through the window in a chilly white-wash. And I had to swallow back the response ‘I have’ because it was crazy.
I have.
I’ve seen them before.
But it was supposed to be a dream. If it hadn’t been, I never would have stabbed that knife through Alice’s back! I never would have shoved May out the window! I wouldn’t have.
...Right?
A chill came over me. I swallowed hard and hurried out of the closet, slamming the door shut. It didn’t have a lock on it, but I had taken to keeping my desk chair in front of it, angled so the back was jammed up under the handle.
Just in case.
Then I pulled on a pair of itchy wool socks and black Mary Janes, both of them kept in a heap at the end of the bed. The whole time, I was thinking about those dolls, and Grandma, and my dream; it didn’t cross my mind that this was a new week at school. I didn’t give the consequences of going a second thought, past how tired I was.
I wished that Grandma and Gramps drank coffee. They said it was bad for the heart and the brain, so they didn’t have any in the house. Well, I would beg to differ about that. Coffee was great for the brain. Steaming-hot wake-up juice! What could be better than that?
Nothing.
A mirror had been hung up on the back of the bedroom door. I stood in front of it, tugging at my skirt and then reaching up to prod at my cheek. There were no visible stars. Just my pink curls, messy from tossing and turning all night, and the faintest traces of smeared eyeliner from the weekend.
“Okay, you need to stop looking for stars,” I told myself. “That was a dream. The stars aren’t going to be there.”
I poked at my cheek a few more times anyway, before finally running my fingers through my hair and heading across the hallway to wash the remnants of makeup off of my face and put a new layer of coverup over the bruising on my temple. It was like the world's ugliest flower sitting there, bloomed out feathery over the soft milk-white of my skin. There was literally no way I could go to school wearing this.
People were going to think—well, I wasn’t sure. But they certainly weren’t going to be thinking anything good, nice, or helpful. It was always the same with the kids at school. They were just jumping at the chance to do something that would hurt my feelings.
The bathroom was small and crowded. Instead of a modern shower, a clawfoot bathtub was shoved into the side of the room, with a truly ancient shower curtain wrapped around it. At some point in the way-long-ago past—and I meant super far back—it had been white. Now, it was a faded yellow, like the bruise I was sporting. There was a wicker table just behind the sink counter, covered in little glass figurines showing people bathing in comical, cartoon ways.
A clown doll sat among them. It had a white porcelain face and white porcelain hands, with a bright-red dot on its nose and silly clown makeup surrounding pure-black eyes. The yellow cone hat it wore was pressed down over a mess of bright blue curls, and his onesie was red on one side and green on the other, with big white ruffs around the collar and the end of both sleeves.
His name was Harry.
At least, in my dream his name had been Harry.
He had cried at a TV show only he could see, and been so afraid of balloons that he had tried to pop them all with a dull needle! And he had asked me to draw him a circus. After fixing up my makeup, I turned to the doll and sighed.
“Why am I actually going to do that, huh? We both know that you didn’t really talk to me,” I told the doll, pretending that there weren’t six new dolls in my bedroom right then.
The clown doll said nothing. He just stared at me with his blank, glassy eyes.
My lips pursed. I left the bathroom, hurried down stairs, and stepped into the dining room. It fit the same trend as everything else that had invaded my life.
Weird. Old. Boring.
Several shelves had been fixed to the walls, each one lined with a variety of dolls. None of them had appeared in my dream; the family had packaged them all up into boxes and shoved them into the basement. Because that’s what happened in dreams—strange things that didn’t make any sense at all. The table at the center of the room looked like it could have sat ten people, with all of the food at one end of it.
My gaze darted to the basement door as I went to my own seat. It was closed. Probably locked.
Gramps sat across from me. He braced one arm on the top of the table and leaned forward. “Hey there, champ.”
All of the Hoggwaller men were short, and Gramps was no exception. He was more bald than not, and he always looked like he was on the verge of crying, even when he was happy as a jaybird. Grandma said it was allergies.
“Morning, Gramps.” After two months, I had gotten used to the nickname. It wasn’t my favorite, but it was miles better than some of the names that people tossed around at school.
“You look like you’re thinking awful hard about something this morning.”
“Nope. Just—tired.” I forced a fake yawn. My tongue curled against my front teeth. “I forgot to set my alarm.”
“That’s what Annie said. Speak of the devil, Annie, that smells amazing.”
Grandma stepped in from the kitchen with breakfast. She had all three plates crammed onto an old-fashioned silver tea tray, which she set at the center of the table.
A jug of milk was balanced there too, along with the cloche of butter that she kept—warm—on the back of the sink.
“Yeah.” I tried to sound sincere. “Amazing.”
Not.
There were a lot of bad trends going on, but one of the worst was the way Grandma…cooked. The eggs were served sunny-side up and so runny they could practically win a marathon, the toast was barely hot enough to melt the room-temperature butter, and the bacon strips were limp and dripping grease.
I missed my dad’s cooking. He was great at making breakfast. His egg casserole was practically to die for. My mouth watered just thinking about it!
Instead, I had to choke down my breakfast like it wasn’t the same thing that Grandma made every morning, without even getting to put a dash of salt on it. Gross!
“You look tired,” Grandma observed. “How is your head feeling?”
“Better.” She had found me in the basement, passed out, on Friday night. I was surprised by how much she had fretted over me during the weekend. As it turned out, my grandparents cared about me an awful lot.
It had just been a long time since they had a teenager in their house.
“Are you sure?” she fretted, using the side of her fork to split apart the runny egg. Clear uncooked egg white mixed with the bacon grease and the yellow of the yolk. Lovely. “You can always stay home today if you need to, Quinn. Your grandfather’s going into town. You could ride with him.”
“Tempting, but I can’t miss my illustration class or I’ll fall behind.” It was half the truth. The project was huge, and I had a lot of changes I needed to implement with it. But even outside of that, the thought of spending all day walking around this dusty little town with Gramps was just… Not great.
Nothing against him, but if I was going to have to be around people, they might as well be my own age.
“Next time,” I promised him, swallowing down the food as quickly as I could. Then I hopped up, apologized for rushing, promised to wash the dishes after dinner, and darted out of the room. My backpack was hanging by the door. I grabbed it on my way out, and was instantly assaulted by the Texas heat.
Even in the early morning hours, the sun was a beast I hated having to deal with. I understood why the Victorians were always walking around with parasols now. I hadn’t even hit the end of the long winding driveway before there was sweat running beads down the back of my neck.
Hatherford Academy was a twenty-minute walk in the sweltering air. I wanted to go back to bed. I still wanted to, even when the building came into view.
In my humble opinion, Hatherford Academy looked like it had come out of a sci-fi magazine about future architecture. It was all sleek, smooth curves, silver and white with flashes of electric blue. The white washed-out cement drive leading to the main doors was already crowded with people, each of them wearing the same outdated uniform as me.
The clothes looked like they came out of an old English magazine. The building looked like it came from a movie about the distant future. I felt like I was somehow a bit of both; people looked at me weird while I made my way to the front doors.
I tried to ignore it, but it wasn’t easy. Their eyes bored holes in the back of my neck. Even the blast of cool AC when I stepped into the front room of the academy wasn’t enough to quell the uneasy feeling that had settled in the pit of my stomach.
On Friday night, I’d had quite the dream.
It was not like the rest of the trends my life was presently made up of. It was not weird, old, or boring. It was fresh, new, and exciting. It gave me a sense of exhilaration that nothing else had ever given me. It had filled me with a sort of energy I found myself craving all weekend.
I was still craving it. Realizing that now made my stomach twist up—the knots tangled and tight. I let out a solid exhale, decided that the best thing that I could do was focus on the school day, and tried to forget what it had felt like to hold a butcher knife.
As it turned out, that was way easier said than done.
Getting Away with Murder
On Mondays, the first class was Life Study, which was boring as all heck. The teacher, Mrs. Kapow, was short and squat, with long silky hair that was always pulled up into intricate flower-shaped buns on the side of her head, and a single Monroe piercing on the left side of her face.
The jewelry glinted in the bright overhead light the whole time she talked; it was way more interesting than what she was talking about. The brief overview that we’d already learned was serious snoreville.
Basically, a life drawing was the sketching of a human figure. In real classes, the figure was pretty much always naked, and they would sit on a stool in the center of the classroom. Because the school wasn’t about to let a naked stranger come for the day, Mrs. Kapow would pull her stool into the center of the room instead and shed the long black trench-coat-style jacket she always wore (despite the Texas weather).
Beneath it was a neon yellow-and-pink bodysuit straight out of a nineties jazzercise video. It covered everything but her arms, a swoop of chest just beneath her neck, and her feet, which were bare. Her toes were painted in bright shades to match her outfit.
Today, she sat on her stool as she rattled off, “You’re lucky, lucky, lucky students.” She liked to do things in threes. “This is one of the most vigorous, rigorous, and long-standing aspects of an artist's training!”
No one listened to her. We were all too busy trying to get out our sketchbooks, pencils, and chunks of charcoal.
I hated traditional sketching. It just felt…wrong. Limited. Like I couldn’t put the things that I was imagining down on the paper for real.
I still gave it my best shot, trying to come up with a sketch of Mrs. Kapow that didn’t totally make her look like a mashed clay sculpture. It wasn’t my fault! I liked to draw in a specific style, and that was a cartoony, Pixar-meets-Andy-Warhol-type…thing.
Trying to do a realistic sketch now… It wasn’t easy for me.
By the time we finished with it, I was more than a little frustrated, and ready to just get out of there for the day. I didn’t want to look at Mrs. Kapow, I didn’t want to hear anything else about how Jacques Louis David had advocated for his students to spend the better part of their day drawing live models, and I didn’t want to try and de-potato that picture.
Illustration class was the second class of the day. Which meant it wasn’t going to be much better.
Normally, I was excited about this class. But today, it just…sat wrong with me.
The teacher, Mr. Carp, was always, always late. As usual great big crowd of students had formed around the door. I hung back at the edges of the crowd, not wanting to speak to any of them. I hadn’t killed Mr. Carp in my dream, but for some reason, I felt like he would know I had done something wrong anyway.
