Hi everyone! (If anybody is actually reading this... :) ) Sorry I haven't updated for awhile, and sorry if my other chapters are short... I try to update a lot, because my chapters have a tenancy to be short. Anyway, hope you like this one! Please read, review and hopefully follow if you like it!

Disclaimer: The only things I own are Emmaline Carlson (AKA Emma) and the idea.

Chapter 4

Emma's POV

Once in my bedroom, I tried to calm myself. In, out. In, out. I breathed evenly and deeply, hot tears still streaming down my face. Sometimes I wished I could wash events out of my head. Especially the part about sitting on someone. The memories of it just made me angry, and I couldn't think of a single time anger had helped me out- it made much more sense to focus on another event.

Irritated at myself, I pulled a box out from under my bed. My room was only partially unpacked, still chaos. Yet I had one way to escape from my life, my nightmare; my dreams. The kind you have when you are asleep AND the kind you wish for. Funny, my dreams had changed very little over the years. I opened my dream diary to when I could barely put together a sentence, but still found the idea of writing stuff down pleasing, since there was no one to tell, my hopes and my nightmares. It didn't make the bad stuff go away, but turned it into a puzzle to piece together.

Nuvumber 1, 2006

I dremed ov a man. He waz mene but nise with lot ov red. I wan t to see Mom and Dad and Sofi and Een. I mis them. Brian sitz with me until I fall aslep at nite. I am glad to se som one I now.

That was my first entry. My spelling was terrible, but I was only six.

Only.

As if that word meant something to me.

It meant the world. Everything. Because I had never been 'only'. I had always been more.

I was my own worst enemy.

Flashbacks were always trying to overcome reality, and ghosts of the long-lost past told me their stories. Not many four-year-old's listen to the story of an unsolved murder mystery, huh? But I was that kid.

There was some reasoning behind my disappearance.

Some reasoning indeed.

I headed downstairs, to the kitchen. No one was there. Faintly, in the distance, I heard the noises of vehicles driving away. Everyone else was at school. Just me and the teachers. My stomach growled angrily. I tip-toed over to the cupboards, quietly, as if to make a loud noise were a crime. I supposed because in some places, it was a crime. They creaked slightly when I opened the first two. Bowls and plates were in messed up piles. I grabbed a bowl. In the next cupboard there were glasses and mugs. After snatching up a glass cup, I opened up the next one to find cereal. There seemed to be hundreds of different kinds floating in front me. With a fast reflex of the hand, I took a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats. Inside of the refrigerator, it was a simple task to find the milk, and the drawer to the left of the dishwasher, was it turned out after many trials, the silverware drawer.

My breakfast made, I sat down. Fishing a book from the messenger's mag always slung around my shoulder, I was completely at home. My eyes ran across the pages of words- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a familiar favorite- as my hand raised spoonfuls of cereal and milk to my mouth. When my cereal was gone, I gulped down the glass of tap water, and placed the dishes in the sink, with mounds of other dishes laying there.

I wondered who did the dishes. Probably Ororo, the woman with the white hair, who seemed to do much of the housework. I felt bad for her, having seen what mess the living room was already. I lay out towels on the counter, and began scrubbing. Once the dishes were washed and the counter and table wiped, and the dishes put away, I sat down in the living room to read some more of my book.

It was glorious- to say the least. I was buried in someone else's troubles, someone else's world, someone else's life. A place of magic woven of words was before me, and I loved it. Who wouldn't? It was paradise, pure gold to me. At many points of my life I have lived off of these very words, as they had given me hope, and my fondness for them had not diminished over the years; instead, it had gradually strengthened, until now, when I could recite entire chapters from memory. I clung to the words like a drownding man clings to driftwood, my one hold on the world, the thing that kept me going. Harry had lost his family just like I had, and even though mine were not dead, they might as well have been, leaving out the fact that I was constanty worried. But this was my relief-water in the desert, and I treasured every moment.

Approximately an hour later, I was tired of sitting, and figured I had better finish unpacking, and trudged upstairs. In my room, I bothered to glance around. The walls were a simple light brown, which was fine with me, even though it was not the color I would have chosen. My window had a very pretty view over the back grounds, the creme windowsill framing it. My twin bed had a lavender quilt with a few pink flowers scattered over it. The wardrobe was made of nice wood, solid, and mostly filled with clothes 'donations'. Professor Xavier, seeing how I had so few outfits, kindly asked all the girls to give him their old, outgrown stuff they didn't want. My bags littered the floor. The toiletries had already been placed in the bathroom, my clothes in the wardrobe, and my messenger's bag organized. However, everything else still had to be unpacked.

I grabbed at my backpack, full of my notebooks, diaries, and journals. I had always written down the things constantly floating into my head from the idea clouds (ha ha, I never could put good jokes in context). An old dream diary from when I was seven, in year two, fell open. My eyes wandered to the first entry, where my spelling had definitely improved, thanks to nightly grammar lessons.

June 20, 2007

I dreamed terrifying things last night. I am scared. A guy who grew up in a log cabin a long time ago in the 1800's was shot because someone did not like the good things he did. I saw the whole thing right in front of me. I have been crying all morning. Why did the gun man kill the nice guy? It is not fair.

I also dreamed my other life. The one where no one is weird. I wish that were my life some of the time.

My writing style was still crude, but at least I could spell that time around. Suddenly angry at my past, I crammed all of my books into a box under my bed. My tears dripped down from my chin, staining the carpet in an odd way. Sometimes I really hated reality. Sometimes me.

And other times I just hated life.

I really hope you enjoyed this recent addition. Now, if anyone is actually reading this, thank you for reading! Please review, and if you like it, follow! Oh, and to La Licorne, thanks for telling me what I did right & wrong. Helped me A LOT... that chapter WAS terrible... but the 'futile attempts' to read her mind weren't Professor Xavier OR Jean Grey... Oh well I removed them anyway. Anyhow, hope you liked it!

-Flying Feather Scribbles