AUTHOR'S NOTE | This story has been rolling around in the back of my mind for a while now. Like... a year. Give or take a couple of months. I wrote down the first few chapters when I first got the idea (which is thoroughly overused, but still...), and then last night I started thinking about it again. So this morning, I went to find it, but apparently I didn't keep it like I thought I did. Whatever. This is the rewrite, then, and I like it. :)
FROM THE EYES OF LANA LOVEGREEN, WITCH:
The house is small. I tour it carefully, praying that I've missed a staircase somewhere that leads to a whole other floor with plenty of space, but there's nothing. A single floor for six people, that's it. The layout of the building is simple, with one hallway leading from the front door straight through the center of the house to the back door. To one side, a small living room that will be transformed into a bedroom; to the other, a kitchen barely large enough for a table for four and a tiny square of space to stand while putting together meals.
Out into the hallway again; a closet-sized laundry room, a tiny bathroom, another bedroom, and then the master bedroom. Which, unlike most master bedrooms, doesn't have a bathroom to itself. Peeking through the back door, I find a postage-stamp sized backyard.
And we have to live here.
But it's better than nothing, at least for the time being. It was the best that we could find on such short notice, in this economy, online because we had to tow our family across an entire ocean just to get here.
I try to imagine how we can settle in here. Thankfully (though, as a mother, it's a bittersweet sort of gratefulness), the twins stayed in California. Payton and Piper are twenty; they can take care of themselves. Taryn could have stayed, too, but she only finished school a year ago, and she didn't think that she could manage on her own. Kyle and I to the master bedroom - which isn't really any larger than any of the others, honestly. That leaves two rooms, one of which isn't even a bedroom in the first place, for four children. The girls to one, I suppose, and the boys to the other.
But really, Taryn will have her own room and Wesley will have a room to himself, too, come September. It's only in a week and a half. The six of us can manage here, until then. Once the school year starts, everything will fit into the tiny house so much easier. Serah and Alexander will be off to school, Taryn says she's going to get a job. Kyle will be working, too, which leaves me with Wesley, and that won't be so bad.
The neighbourhood will be told he's being homeschooled. He'll have to play inside (it's not as though he'll be losing a lot, with that little square of grass) so they don't see him, so they'll be more inclined to believe the story. In another year, he'll be off to school with his older siblings.
Until then, he knows to keep up the lie. He knows that nobody on this little dead-end street can find out that he's a wizard, just like his brother, just like his older sisters are witches.
AUTHOR'S NOTE #2 | I don't usually do two author's notes, but I just wanted to say that I'd like some feedback on whether or not I should continue the story, and what you guys think. In my mind, it focuses on Serah, who's about to enter her sixth year of school and would sort of be transferring to Hogwarts from a magic school in America. Once she gets there, some of the characters from the epilogue of the Deathly Hallows will be making their appearances and be pretty heavily involved with the story, though there will also be a lot of OOC's. What do you guys think? Should I continue it?