I published a story a while back called 'Forgotten' and had some people ask me exactly who the OC who showed up was. (Katy, for those of you who haven't read it.) I decided to write up a story featuring her, the best I can. Hope you enjoy it!
P.S. This is mostly just an intro. More chapters coming if y'all enjoy it!
Time travel could be brilliant. It could be everything, an escape, an adventure, a life, a way to truly live. A way to finally love.
But there was always a price.
There was always, always, a price.
Caroline L. Nichols was fifteen years old. She was nothing special. She did well in school and had moved four times before her fifteenth birthday – nothing strange until you noticed her time was divided almost equally between two houses, two neighborhoods, two churches, and two sets of friends. She was on the heavy side, but tall, so she always gave the impression she was older than she really was. She lived with her parents and her little sister, who was old enough to be annoying but young enough to get away with it. She loved to sing, and her room was decorated with white – oak furniture and lots of frills and pink. To anyone outside of her immediate family, she was the perfect example of a well-raised southern belle, minus the tiny waist and handsome boyfriend, of course.
Caroline, (pronounced Ka-ro-leeen, not Karo-liine) had the perfect life.
At least, that's how it seemed.
In truth, her life was not, and had never been, anywhere close to perfect. Her first few years were spent in a small-ish town in the south, her days filled with play-dates and frilly dresses and sweets. She was put in the accelerated program two days after she started Kindergarten, and quickly moved her way to the top of the class, and the spot as the teacher's pet. She kept this status all the way to third grade – she was always in charge, and she was always right. She had friends, she had beautiful things, and she had brains. Everyone knew she would make it to the top, and soon.
The next year, though, things got more difficult. Her daddy's job took him to a town where everyone was rich and everyone had power. She was thrown into a world where school-work came second and status was always the buzz word. She spent a year and a half struggling, and then fell in with the kind of girls who knew exactly what they were doing. She rose to the top, again, but this time being there meant she ate only salads at lunch and flirted with all the boys, especially the cute ones. She learned the tricks of the trade, and nearly destroyed herself in doing so. It didn't matter to her though, because she had found a new way to pretend to shine.
The next years were spent in that cycle: academics, popularity, repeat. There was no in between that she had found; she wondered often if anyone ever had. She went through times when she was the confident know-it-all that her teachers loved and her classmates were scared of, and times when she did everything she could to be better, convinced she wasn't good enough. Her life was this way until she was 15 years, 5 months, three days and twenty-six minutes old.
That was the day everything changed.
Well? I certainly enjoyed writing it, so I hope you enjoyed reading it!