A young girl shivered in the corner of the desolate room. Clean beds surrounded her as snow fell from the old roof into the carved-in names of the children that she once knew. She peeked through the hole in the wall near the head of her bed where she would watch the London people live their lives. She would see the baker sell his bread from dawn till dusk and she'd notice how some men would wear uniforms and would hold muskets. Mothers would hold her children's hands and she'd see the pretty girls wear new dresses and how the boys would give them flowers. She was the only one left, the one that no one wanted. It had been fifteen years of waiting but no one came.
She had asked the old orphanage maid what her name is for, Mr. Lock, the orphanage ruler, was mean and strict. The old maid would respond, "A beautiful name". She wondered who her parents were and if they were alive still, for children had told her that their own parents had gotten killed or had died. If they were alive, she wondered what they did. She imagined her mother very beautiful and her father by her side though she wondered why she wasn't there with them.
On her tenth birthday, the old maid had bought the little orphan girl a book after many years of learning how to read loose papers around the orphanage. The book was to be banned for the ideas it was filling children with, but the old maid responded to the book seller by saying, "This is for a poor small child who has seen the world through a hole".
On Christmas Eve that year the old maid had died while reading the book to the young orphan girl. From then on the book was more than special to her. Her head spun for years straight over the book and its adventures she longed to experience. She would be kept in that old building for fifteen years until she would decide to escape for good.
She took her book from under her grimy pillow and cradled it lightly on her fingertips while she waited for Mr. Lock to leave for his morning stroll. "Written by Elizabeth Swan Turner" she read aloud. She would think to herself about how pretty Elizabeth was in real life and how she longed to meet her. Then she would read aloud the title, "The Legends of Captain Jack Sparrow". She closed her eyes and imagined what the ocean smelled like for that was where she would be heading. And she imagined a ship waiting for her on the dock with her dreams.