Jack's not in this chapter but he will be in the next one
The recent discovery of the usage of chalk for artistic value had created a disaster in Morgan's room. The carpet had recently become very colorful and her mother soon became slightly agitated at the rate they went through paper towels. When Morgan moved on to cloth towels, she was once again reprimanded for taking all the washcloths in the house. Tired of dealing with her mother, who she noticed was becoming more irritable the older she got, Morgan moved her chalk drawings to the kitchen table between the hours of dinner. Her father said it was all right to occupy the kitchen, as long as she had everything cleaned up by the time dinner started.
It was hard to work in the room anyway. She didn't mind the mess, but she hated how the chalk got all over her clothes and it was hard to wash out. Her mother didn't like it either. Plus, since her window had gotten fixed, she found it was colder than normal and frost often found it's way on the inside. Jack promised he wasn't doing that, and he tried to pay extra attention to keep snow and frost out of it, but it didn't work. It was hard to maintain the chill and the interior of her bedroom at the same time. Eventually, they decided it was must have been poor work on the window itself, and was due to the workmanship, which Jack could not help.
Now she was trying to use the edge of an grey stick to try and create an image of the torture room in the Spanish Inquisition. Her mind was so focused on the colors she was blending she never noticed when Peter sat down on the other end of the table.
"What do you know about the Holy Roman Empire?" he asked her.
"It was holy and it was ruled by Romans and it probably had an emperor," she vaguely told him. But then she stopped her hand from rubbing against the paper's surface and her mind drifted away from her work. "Wait. Say that again."
"What do you know about the Holy Roman Empire?" Her head jolted up this time and she stared at her brother, who was definitely probably the meanest of them all, and it occurred to her he was genuinely wanting her help. However, this apparent event in history was something she wasn't familiar with.
"Nothing," she muttered shyly.
"You know nothing about it?"
"You realize there's thousands and thousands of years of history?" Todd commented as he headed to clear out the trash. "Even Historians can't possibly know everything."
"But this is the Holy Roman Empire," Peter argued. "And Morgan is the residential historical expert."
"That's not exactly something they teach kids under twelve," Todd said. "Morgan doesn't spend hours looking up random events in history on her own, she hears a snippet about something or learns it in school, and then spends all her time obsessing on that particular event."
"That's stupid," Peter grumbled. "How am I supposed to do this report now?"
"How about go to the library like everyone else?"
"This is due tomorrow!"
"Well, you should have started it earlier!" Todd barked. "You're not using Morgan to do your homework for you."
"Well, I want to learn about the Holy Roman Empire anyway," Morgan said and closed her sketchbook.
"I'm thinking that finding books for your age group on that subject will be difficult."
"That I'll find one at an accelerated reading level," Morgan stated, putting her chalk back into the box. Todd removed the trash from the bin and began to tie it at the top. He turned to the sink and ran a washcloth under the water so he could toss it over to the table. Morgan looked at him grateful and began to clean up her chalk mess.
"Do you want to go to the library, Morgan? I'll take you."
"Yeah!" Morgan said.
"Take me too so I can get this done," Peter demanded.
"I'm sure everything you need is in the textbook you never open. All you do at the library is prey on hot girls and use everything you hear from Morgan to sound intelligent. You can stay here."
"History is the most worthless subject though!" Peter slammed his textbook down in frustration. "It's in the past, who cares? It's better to pretend it never happened."
"Excuse me but tell that to the Holocaust victims!" Morgan screeched as she stood up and puffed her cheeks with anger. "Tell that to the soldiers from Vietnam! Tell that to-"
"Morgan, calm down. Those are just the words of someone who's yet to have a girlfriend who then turns around and breaks up with him," Todd said with a devilish look to his brother. He swiped a ring of keys from the hook near the door.
"Hey, that's not funny!" Peter shouted.
"I think it is!" Morgan giggled. Peter slammed his hands against the surface of the table and his eyes darted angrily between the two of you.
"You guys suck," he spat at them.
"Ignore him, Morgan," Todd told his little sister. He gestured to her to leave out the door. Before doing so, she looked back at Peter, slamming his textbook shut.
"Loser!" she called.
"Morgan," Todd warned. Morgan scurried to the car.
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"I don't understand some of these words," Morgan admitted, as she scanned over a six hundred page account of the whole history of the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire.
"That's kinda because it's a college reading level," Todd chuckled as he tossed the dusty blonde hair from his eyes.
"You're smart, explain it to me."
"I'm not... Morgan, I'm not reading 600 pages to you."
"Well, can you tell me what the Holy Roman Empire is?" she begged. Mild irritation flashed across his face when he rolled his eyes to the ceiling and blew out a small breath. He shuffled his shaggy hair around as he painfully watched Morgan.
"I don't really know. I mean I do. I know that for a while, the Romans controlled most of Europe, and that's a very basic idea of what it is, but I also remember the history being far more detailed than certain. I bet you don't even know the entire account of the American Revolution, or the War of the Roses."
"War of the Roses? I want to learn about that too!"
"Oh boy..." he huffed. "That's also really detailed. Morgan... the stuff you know, it's mostly battles and events that were really short. Think about... well okay. Think about this. World War II. How many battles about it do you really know?"
"Um..."
"Exactly. But you know about the Holocaust, and you know about Pearl Harbor and how that introduced America into the war."
"V-J Day."
"They're teaching kids about V-J Day?"
"No," Morgan laughed. "It's me, Todd. Remember? I heard Peter make a joke once that V-J Day sounded really dirty and it sounded more like-"
"RIGHT," Todd interrupted hurriedly. "I get it. You looked it up. Don't listen to Peter, he says really offensive stuff sometimes."
"I know," Morgan sighed and looked back at her book. "I just wish I could understand this."
"My point is, because of all the content and it's a lot to take in, sometimes histories of an entire topic are not put into juvenile learning books. They just put in certain events, such as The Boston Tea Party instead of writing about the whole of the Revolutionary War including the battles and stuff."
"Except the war hadn't officially started yet," Morgan reminded, taking her very comfortable mode again. "It sparked things, but it didn't-"
"I get it!" Todd laughed loudly and received a nasty look from the woman behind the counter. "What I'm saying is try not to take everything in at once. People unfortunately don;t accommodate for children who want to learn this. But maybe... we can see if there's a documentary on the Holy Roman Empire?"
"I don't have a TV in my room!" Morgan whined, flailing her arms with the frustration of not being able to learn what she wanted to learn.
"Just use the one in my room!" Todd offered. "If it's okay if I use your room to do my homework."
"Don't blame me if Peter comes in to snap a picture of you sitting with my fluffy animals."
"Hey, fluffy animals are cool. I'm not ashamed." Morgan grasped the thick book and waddled over to the crescent shaped desk, setting it on the desk. The librarian's name was Patricia and at least once a week Morgan had come in to either read some new historical book or was looking at a book while drawing. She had quickly come to realize what a strangely intense interest the girl had for history.
"Patricia, do you have any documentaries on the Holy Roman Empire?" Morgan asked and the middle-aged woman turned to her computer and began to clack at the keys.
"I do. It's a few years old. It was a part of a series about European Dynasties. Would you like it?"
"Yes please!" Morgan looked out the window at the snow started to grow heavy.
"Oh I hope I can get out..." Todd mumbled while he also watched. Patricia wrote down a series of letters and numbers with dots in between to find the documentary.
"Look up stuff on Jack Frost too! The school library didn't have anything." she demanded suddenly.
"Oh?" Patricia asked. "That's different. "You don't ever ask about fictitious characters."
"He's not fictitious!" she angrily sad.
"He's kinda become her invisible friend," Todd explained. "She is always talking about all the fun they have." Patricia was back at her computer, pounding at the keys.
"Usually kids make up the invisible friend. Not take an already existing concept," said Patricia. She moved her mouse on the screen and hummed to herself while she searched. "There's a crime show involving someone named Jack Frost."
"He doesn't solve crimes!" Morgan cried.
"A movie about him trying to ruin Christmas?"
"Lies. Next."
"A movie about a snowman."
"Jack's not a snowman!"
"There's a series about fairies and Jack Frost is mean to him. Look, there's even one about a fairy named Morgan!"
"It's possible Jack might be mean in a teasing way... but not that's not him."
"Well, there's this one... a boy is lonely one winter, and then he see Jack at his window and they become friends and have fun. But it's a book for really little kids."
"I don't care! That sounds really good!" Patricia wrote down more numbers and led the way between the shelves, finding the movie Morgan wanted and the thin, blue, picture book. A moment after checking them out found them on their way home once again. Morgan flipped through the kids book on the way home and found that it was a sweet story, a pretty close idea to what Jack acted like, but the illustration was completely wrong. It made him look like a white pine tree wearing a rain poncho.
On her way up the stairs, she could hear Peter pounding at his keyboard and swearing under his breath. She giggled, pleased with herself. Todd had really stepped in and taken the place Aubrey normally would have taken and left him in a state of frustration, and it served him right. But remembering Aubrey upset her a little. She tossed the children's book over to the desk and sighed, staring at the documentary in her hands. The ends of her dark waves brushed against the case and her desire. Aubrey never knew about Jack Frost, not really. Todd was nice about it, but he made it clear he didn't believe. She was certain Aubrey would never believe, but she would at least pretend to and talk to him for Morgan's amusement.
She moaned and fell forwards onto the bed so her brother in the next room – Peter – wouldn't hear her and declare her a crybaby.
The deal with Morgan's window happened at my old house. There used to be a narrow walkway between the bed and the window and my sister used to sit on the window ledge and put her feet on my bed... and then one day her bed went through the window and it broke. Since then we fixed it but the temperature in that room was never the same because it wasn't fixed right. There is literally ice and frost on the INSIDE of the window. I'm talking ICICLES. It sucked.
As for the books, I did a search on my own library's website to get an idea of what a fairly sized library would have (As Harrisburg, where Morgan lives, is a pretty decent sized place, similar to where I live and probably has a similar sized library) and you can probably guess a few of them. These are all real books and the one Morgan gets is called Here Comes Jack Frost by some Japanese woman and it looks pretty cute. But the fairy series... this DOES exist and it is kinda disturbing. Jack Frost is like terrorizing all these fairies, and my library has... 75 of these books, each one about a different fairy and I swear their mission is to use every single American or Anglo-European female name in the world for these fairies. I have one with my name (EVEN SPELLED THE SAME WAY! THAT NEVER HAPPENS! :) ) and there was one that was "Kate The Royal Wedding Fairy" (wonder where that inspiration came from?) and then there was "Lucy The Diamond Fairy"... if that wasn't taken from Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds I will eat my hat. And I will record myself doing so. And show you guys.
I want to try and give a little insight on Morgan's family too. It occurred to me that you guys don't really know them well so I'm going to try and work that in. I'm going to try to get another chapter in tonight before I need to go to bed. I probably may not get to work on more tomorrow. I work and I need to go to bed as soon as I get home because on Sunday I have an EARLY appointment to get my kitty fixed... I feel a little bad taking his manhood... :(
With that image, Rosie out.
BTW: My real name is NOT Rosie. But it is my internet name.
