A/N: This story is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me lol. I started writing this a few years ago to just offer myself a mental escape for a while... Well, I need that again. Only, this time, I wanted to invite you with me. :)
Please enjoy!
"I'd much rather pretend I'm
somewhere else, and any time I open
the pages of a book, that happens."
―Jodi Picoult
When I encounter a guy who is too gorgeous for his own good, one of three things tend to happen:
1. Silence. I open my mouth but no words come out. All I can do is stare stupidly with my mouth hanging wide enough to accommodate a triple deck burger while my brain turns to mush.
2. Stutter. I can be on the phone for hours with my best friend, but if confronted by a cute guy—wham! I get power outage and my brain short-circuits. You'd be lucky to get anything out of me besides, "Erm...uh...I..."and a ton of blushing.
3. Stumble. I trip over my own two feet. Yeah, it's easy to do hat when you're five-nine and gangly, but I manage to make the dance teacher cry when I was five-years-old. Or, even worse, I knock things over and spill food.
All three of these happen within three minutes when I bump into Gabriel Castellano this morning.
I'm heading toward class when my cell phone signals I've just received a text message from my mom:
I've got to work an extra shift tonight. Get home ASAP after school.
Mom has started taking on more work whenever possible so she can save up for when I go to university. I wish she didn't have to—I've offered to get a part-time job, but someone has to look after my little sister, Lori, in the evenings and, besides, I have to study extra hard for scholarships. The competitive ones provide a lot more funding than I could save up for from flipping burgers several hours per week. Still, I feel bad when she comes in around 10 PM, completely exhausted.
Shoulders slumped, eyes on the ground, I turn round a corner and nearly bump into the guy coming in my direction. I would continue on my way if he didn't talk to me.
"Excuse me. Can you tell me where the gym is?"
I can only stare. Six feet of pure, unadulterated hotness. There is a slight accent in his voice, but that only makes him sexier, in my opinion.
"I'm new here," the guy clarifies with an apologetic smile.
"Oh...erm...hi." My mouth goes Sahara dry and I try hard not to gawk. Focus, Ari. I try to recall what he's asking for. "The gym...it's that way."
"Thanks." He flashes me a dazzling smile and walks on. Then, it suddenly dawns on me: I've given him the wrong direction!
"Hey -wait! It's actually the other way!" I have to hurry to catch up with his long strides. My foot catches on a lower step—I stumble and fall, my knees hitting the linoleum floor. My cell phone and the books I'm carrying spills around me.
Great. How could I forget that extra step? Who's the new student here, huh?
"Are you all right?" The guy crouches and begins to help me pick up my stuff, but I wave him away.
"Seriously, I'm fine." I don't want him to see my cell phone, an old black-and-white Nokia model. Nor do I want him picking up my well-worn copy of Anne of Green Gables, which I plan to read in class. As if I need to remind him I'm a huge freak who still reads classics. Children's classics, in fact.
"Gabriel!" A girl squeals. It's Maris Crane, this gorgeous, sophisticated blonde who moved to our small town two years prior from Chicago. She's been in a state of mourning because nothing in Riverdale can measure up to her cosmopolitan standards. This is the first time I've seen her so perky, "I've been looking all over for you! The bell's going to ring soon. C'mon, Mr. P will murder us if we're late."
I quickly collect all of my things and scamper off. Just my luck—I've never managed to act normal in front of any cute guy.
At home, Lori is glued in front of the TV, watching SpongeBob. I don't understand what's so appealing about an ugly yellow character that lives in a pineapple under the sea (Sailor Moon I can understand), but that's one of the many differences between my sister and myself. She's ten, I'm eighteen. She prefers television, while I'm addicted to reading (though we both spend ridiculous amounts of time on the internet).
Lori is beautiful, like my mother, and I'm...well, every time I see my father, I want to yell at him for superseding his gene's over Mom's. You see, Mom's family is Latino. Even though she's nearly forty, she doesn't look it. She has chestnut-brown hair that's thick and luxuriant, eyelashes so long they look like butterfly wings, and full red lips that need no lipstick. So she might not be model-thin, but it doesn't matter. When she smiles and those big, luminous eyes of hers light up, pretty much any guy she talks to gets this glassy, glazed look.
Lori, lucky Lori, looks just like Mom, who resembles a plumper version of Penelope Cruz. While I'm over here looking like Jo March in Little Women. I have long arms and big feet and freckles all over my nose. Whoever says lemon juice works is a dirty liar.
Like Jo, my only good feature is my hair. It's thick and wavy like Mom's, but auburn red like Dad's. In first grade, a boy called me "carrots," but I was too wimpy to whack him over the head like Anne Shirley did to Gilbert Blythe. Also like Jo, I love to read. Mom says its a miracle that I don't wear glasses, judging how I have devoured book after book ever since she first took me to the library when I was four. If the Beast gave me a library like he gave to Belle, I'd marry him too. Books open new worlds to me. Life in small-town Riverdale is horribly dreary—we only have one main street downtown with all of the shops, and the rest is just boring residential areas.
Once a commercial is on, Lori bounces onto the floor. "Hey, Ari!" she says excitedly. "Guess what's for dinner today?"
I don't get what she's so excited about. When Mom isn't home we have leftovers or frozen meals. Actually, even when she is home, we usually use the microwave or takeout, since she's too exhausted to whip up anything freshly cooked on the spot.
Lori drags me to the kitchen and makes me sit on a stool at the island.
"Close your eyes."
I hear her opening the fridge. Then the sound of a bowl being set on the countertop.
"Can I open them now?"
"Not yet." More rustling—she pops open a plastic bag, I think. "Okay! Now, you can open your eyes."
In front of me sits this large bowl filled with bits of juicy red tomatoes, purple onions, and green cilantro scattered over the top. Next to the bowl is a plate of tortilla chips.
"You made salsa?"
"Abuela sent me the recipe," Lori says, beaming. "She says fresh is the way salsa should be eaten. You know how she hates the canned stuff we get in the supermarket. All I did was chop up everything and mix in a bit of lemon juice and salt. C'mon, try some!"
I dip a chip into the salsa and take a tentative bite. Sweet, tangy flavors explode in my mouth, blending into each other in perfect harmony.
"This is awesome, Lo," I say. "And you're even more awesome to make it!"
She glows with pride. Unlike me, Lori is genuinely happy when doing household chores, though she's a sloth when it comes to her lessons. Another thing that shows how different we are, whether in looks or personality.
The commercial ends; Lori scrambles back to the sofa.
"By the way, Mom says you have to clean out the attic," she adds, her eyes instantly glued to the TV. "She says you have too many books up there. There's a yard sale this weekend, and she wants to try and sell off whatever doesn't look like junk."
I roll my eyes. All right, I admit that I splurged way too much on books when Dad was still with us. I still get loads of books, but that's because there are plenty of free-dirt-cheap e-books out there, plus you don't have to worry about moths eating up the pages.
But even if I clean out the attic, we hardly have any stuff to fill it up. Mom has been super frugal since the divorce.
I sigh. I don't want to part with my books, but a lot of them are probably too young for me now, anyways. God knows I have enough stacked in my room.
After changing into a pair of comfy sweats and tossing my hair atop my head, I make my way up to the dust attic. Only five minutes in and I sneeze. No wonder Mom is keen to get rid of the stuff, it's becoming too crowded in here. Boxes and boxes of my old books take up, like, half of the room.
Still, I open every box and check the contents before hauling them downstairs. I have to know which books are going into the yard sale. I don't want any out-of-print books being sold off...but, then again, no one will want books that old anyway.
After heaving five boxes to the garage, I'm out of breath. I sit on the floor and rest for a while.
Just then my cell phone starts ringing. It's from Chaz Marshall, the editor-in-chief of our school paper: the Riverdale Herald.
"Hey, Aria, we're all meeting tomorrow, so make sure your butt is parked in our corner during lunch."
"Okay," I mumble, propping my cell between my shoulder and ear. "You got any ideas for the next issue?"
"Oh, yeah," he sounds pleased with himself. "I'm thinking of doing an interview with that guy who just transferred from Australia—Gabriel something."
"Gabriel Castellano?"
"You've met him all ready?"
"Uh...sort of," I flinch, trying not to think about my not-so-spectacular run-in with him earlier today. I fail miserably.
"Right. Well, I want you to interview him; it's the first time Riverdale High has had an exchange student."
Panic races up my chest. No, no, definitely not. I can't even speak to him without stuttering or staggering over my two left feet! "I...uh, I don't think I should be the one to do it." I grope for a good reason to get out of doing the interview. "Chaz, I'm an editor, not a writer. And besides, why do we have to interview him? No one reads the paper, anyways."
"Thanks for the encouragement," he says sardonically. "But, actually, yes. I think it'll get more people to read it if we feature Gabriel. Girls' heads were literally turning when he walked down the hall today."
Yeah, I can imagine that. Maris, who looks down her nose at everyone, actually squealed when she called out to him today in the hallway.
But I still can't interview him. Although a tiny part of me is thrilled at the chance to speak with him again, I don't want to make an even bigger of an idiot of myself in front of him than I already have. He knows that I gave him the wrong directions at a school I've been attending for four years, and he's seen me fall face-first to the ground. I just can't do it.
"Find someone else, Chaz. I'm sure someone else will be willing to do it."
I click off the phone. Then I sigh and reach for the last box—it smells of sawdust. I pop the lid open. Half of the box is filled with plush toys, while the other half contains picture books.
No wonder I don't remember this box—these books are from, what, at least twelve years ago?
But even though the box isn't familiar, the books are. I lift out a gilt-edged volume of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales, a gorgeously illustrated version of Sleeping Beauty, and a large, thin hardback of Cinderella.
I hold up the copy of Cinderella. The pages within are yellowed, the edges of the cover peeling off, and the binding frayed and loose. Carefully, I turn a page. The first page shows a maid kneeling in front of a hearth.
"'Once upon a time...'"
Of course. What fairy tale doesn't start with that infamous opening line?
"Ari! Ari!"
Lori is calling for me. I scramble up, still holding the book in my left hand, and somehow it slips. Like, I'm holding the front cover with my hand, but the rest of the book just falls apart. I watch, horrified, as the faded pages flutter haphazardly to the floor.
"Aria?" Mom's voice floats from the stairway. "Can you come down for a second?"
"Coming!" I call.
I drop the book cover on the floor and dash toward the stairs. My socked-clad foot catches on something—a jutting nail, I think—and I lose my balance. I fall forward, tripping down the stairs, clawing wildly for support.
Can my klutziness get any worse?
And then a sharp pain sears through my head and everything goes black.