AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Prologue
I came home from school laden with brochures, web links, and mountains of information about the possible colleges where I could find my future. We’d had a day-long assembly in the auditorium, featuring representatives from a number of schools looking to recruit the best fits for their programs as well as giving out information to the rest of us.
Some were seeking athletes, others brain-squad types, and a few even the community-minded students who looked toward careers in social work or other fields serving others. And because I went to an all-girl’s parochial school—not that we were Catholic, but Mom and Dad thought it was the best education—we had even been visited by members of a number of religious orders who wanted to discuss their programs as well.
Yes, at least one of my schoolmates wanted to be a nun, and the funny part? I admired her for knowing where her future lay. Having a calling like that at eighteen said a lot about a person, I thought. Most of the rest of us were still pretty confused. I was still pretty confused but excited to have the opportunity for advanced education. My parents had always talked about what a great college experience I’d have. My bedtime stories as a little girl often featured the adventures of a magical child who looked just like me but older, heading off to a college more like a castle than a typical American campus.
I’d been enchanted.
When I was five.
Since then, I’d seen and heard enough to understand that colleges and universities had their good and bad points, but I was grateful my family supported my achievements, and I studied hard to have good grades. Mom and Dad were planning to pay my tuition, but if I could get scholarships, I could save them at least some of that. After all, we weren’t billionaires who lived in a mansion. Just an ordinary family, with parents who worked hard for the money. I needed to help where I could.
And while University of Hawaii and Notre Dame sounded pretty amazing, once I finished daydreaming over the pretty pictures of ivy-covered walls and rolling surf, I knew I’d decide to go to the college in town, at least for my first two years. Unless I did manage to get a full-ride scholarship, which almost nobody did, I needed to find any way to save money that I could. If I did all my basic classes at a community school, I could finish off somewhere bigger and my degree would read the same as anyone who’d been there all four years.
Still…the castle college from the fairy tales was always at the back of my mind. It actually made me giggle to think how I’d believed in the place. Maybe I’d see if I could sign up for a class or two this year, in the spring, just to get my feet wet.
Flipping idly through one full-color brochure after another, I didn’t notice my parents had arrived until they were sitting across the kitchen table from me, and Dad cleared his throat.
“What’s so interesting, Boo?”
I felt my eyebrows rise to my hairline. Dad hadn’t called me Boo in years. “I’m, uh, looking at college brochures. We had an assembly today, and it’s really important I get all my paperwork in order.” I pushed some not-full-color pages at them. “Financial aid, scholarships, all that. And of course applications. It’s my senior year, you know.”
“We know,” Mom said with a little choked-off laugh. “I can’t believe it’s already time for you to leave the nest.”
“About that.” I prepared to share my grand plan, proud of my maturity and pragmatism. Sure, I’d love to go away, share a dorm room with another freshman, eat bad food in the cafeteria, stay up late studying, and maybe even a little bit of partying. “I think I’ll just go to Downtown JC next year, get my feet under me and…what?”
They were looking at each other then at me then each other again.
I rubbed at my face, wondering if I had a crumb on it from the cookies I’d been munching or something. “Guys? What’s the matter?”
Mom plastered the reassuring smile on her face that she used when she was about to break bad news. Maybe I was assuming too much when I planned college at all.
“Did you need me to just go right to work and help pay bills? Instead?” I’d never seen any signs of financial distress, but several of the girls at school were going to have to do just that. Help out. And I’d gladly do it. But it didn’t make sense here. I mean, Mom got a new car a few months ago and while we didn’t live crazy, we had a nice vacation every year. We took turns picking destinations, and I’d picked Hawaii for this coming summer. Maybe I was assuming too much. “I don’t have to go to school after June. In fact, maybe I should get a part-time job now.”
How had I been so self-absorbed I hadn’t recognized the problem? Mom had been coupon cutting a lot lately.
“Endymion, stop.” Mom fixed me with her most serious, fiercest stare, as if using my full name hadn’t been hint enough. “Of course you’re going to college, but it will have to be the one everyone in the family goes to. The one Dad and I went to. And our parents, all four of them. Why, it’s been our tradition for centuries.”
“C-centuries?” I looked around our eat-in kitchen. It was clean and neat with reasonably new appliances but not one thing in it said family with traditions. “What are you talking about?”
“The school we’ve told you about since you were a tiny baby. The Sciathain Academy.”
I felt like my brain was melting. “That place is real?” But surely it wasn’t a castle…
Chapter One
“Psst, I have nothing under my gown,” Samantha whisper-shouted to me. My last name was Glimmer and my friend Samantha’s last name was Griffin, so in a small graduating class such as ours, there was no one between us in alphabetical order. Also, we’d managed to be almost the same height, so even if the order was tall to short…still standing together.
“I didn’t need to know that.” Honestly, I had no idea that Samantha and I were on a naked-talk level of friendship. If you’d asked me three seconds ago, I would’ve told you Samantha was an acquaintance only. Yes, we’d been stuck together at these school formalities since we were in kindergarten, but I really didn’t know her.
She must have been thinking the same thing since she said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about the fact that we never became friends. Why is that?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be friends with her, it was simply that we were different and not in the opposites-attract kind of way. It was more of theI live in a cottage and you live in a mansion with butlerskind of way. Not that I was prejudiced against wealthy people, but she and her friends drew an invisible line, and everyone knew where it was in the sand.
My loss of a reason gave way to a shrug.
She patted her perfectly platinum hair and without a mirror reapplied her lipstick. “Well, maybe it’s time we were. You are going to State, right?”
