The Secret World of Shelly Pace by Julie Steimle (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud .txt) 📕

laughing at her or someone else? Shelly peeked out of the corner of her eye, and noticed the staring of the boys, and the jabbing and juvenile prodding of one particular boy. That one boy opened the car door. Mr. Brenner still had not found the homework assignment.
Shelly averted her eyes, trying to keep her mind on her duty to pick up homework. It was too hard. Shelly peeked again at the car. It was Daniel Taylor. The cute boy that lived just a block from her house was coming over to her. Was he going to talk to her or make fun of her? He was one of the jerks in the car. Daniel kept walking towards her and then he stopped. He had a sheepish look on his face as he motioned back to his friends in the car.
“I’m sorry about what happened back there.” He tried to apologize.
Shelly looked at her feet, kicking her shoe as the laces flopped on the concrete. Mr. Brenner looked under his shoulder and smiled a little. He had the blank pages of “busy work” for Marcell in his hand.
“We didn’t mean to scare you like that,” Daniel said as catcalls were heard from the car again. Mr. Brenner straightened up his tie and slowly walked over with the papers.
Daniel shifted in his shoes. “Well, I’ll see you around.” He awkwardly stepped back to the car with his friends and reluctantly opened the door to join them. They cheered him inside, though some booed him for not asking her out when he could have. Shelly stared in shock.
“Here you go.” Mr. Brenner broke her trance. “Make sure Marcell has these done by Monday, and tell her to get well for me.” The man winked at Shelly as she took the papers. Dirty old man, she thought. Pausing before heading back home, Shelly watched the car full of boys and one plotting teacher, drive off and into the street.
Shelly quickly turned her back on the school. It was her third High School so far, why would she have affection for it now, she rationalized. She tucked the papers into the plastic shopping bag that her mother reminded her to take and headed back home. The sidewalk and street dried up nicely in the sun and the puddles lay scattered like little lakes of tar in a vast desert of volcanic sand. Shelly smiled.
She was a girl from a distant land traveling alone across the dark deserts of Adara on the world called Sephus. She knew the pools of Adara held magical powers. Some were portals to other worlds, others were filled with poison that if you drank it or touched it you would disintegrate immediately. But one was a pool of clear water and all Sephurians sought to find it and drink it. It would give them knowledge and magical power. The girl knew where the pool of water was, because an ancient seer told her when she went to the city of Garza. He was once the protector of the pool and was about to die. He had to pass on the secret, because he was getting too old for the job, so he told her …uh …Shell…no…Sharalla the warrior where it was. She would protect it to the very end of her life she would….
“Shelly! Where have you been? You have been gone three hours and the school is only two blocks away!” Marcell impatiently grabbed the bag of homework from her sister’s hands and tromped off to her bedroom. She seems well enough, Shelly thought.
Shelly could see her mother shake her head in the other room and walk into the kitchen. Shelly stared up again at the ceiling and rolled her eyes. She started to walk down the hall to her bedroom, to lie in her bed.
“Shelly,” her mother called. “You need to take down the laundry.”
The laundry. Oh. She forgot.
Shelly stepped out into the backyard where the eight lines of clothes waited for her. She quickly stepped into the garage and grabbed the plastic laundry basket and out again onto the tall, uncut grass. She laid the basket down and methodically pulled the shirts and pants and socks off the line. A moist drop fell onto her face. Another came. And another.
“Ug! This is hopeless!” She cried out loud at the rain and long lines of dry clothes. “You can’t dry clothes in the rain!”
Shelly yanked shirt after shirt, after pant, after bra, popping clothespins off and into the grass. Several pins still hung on the line. Shelly barely had all the clothes down when it started to pour rain on top of her and the barely dry pile in the basket. She picked the basket up and ran across the yard and into the kitchen. Panting, she looked up at her mother, who had watched the whole scene with an amused look.
“Mother, you have got to get another method for drying clothes.”
Her mother smiled and wiped her hands on a dish towel. She had been washing dishes. Her mother did not believe dishwashers worked as well as human hands, just like she did not believe driers really helped clothes keep germ free. Her mother smiled and patted Shelly’s arm, which was wrapped around the basket of clothes.
“Perhaps, one day. Maybe,” she said.
Shelly slumped in her chair. She let out a tired breath of air and forced herself to stand up and head into the living room. She had laundry to fold. She was a maid… deaf and folding laundry of a nobleman who sat in awe of her. She was a beauty, far more beautiful than Marcell, the duchess of Hambershire and heiress to the kingdom of Danmore. She was Shell…no…Sarah the silent. Imprint

Publication Date: 11-13-2009

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