Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Which was basically the story of my life. When You Think Things Can’t Go Any More Wrong, Hold Your Horses: The Gracie Castro Story. Coming to theaters never. Shinto Studios would shoot the screenplay down before they even finished reading the title. Gracie Castro: The Sorceress of Secrets might work, I thought glumly. Except I didn’t have any powers, if you didn’t count my rare but epic stomachaches.
Like the one I had right then, that I hoped was actually gas or just uneasiness about moving.
I cast a long look around the living room of the mostly bare single-wide trailer that had been home for years. Then I probably sighed for the tenth time in the last ten minutes and settled deeper into the couch for comfort. It was the closest thing to a hug I was going to get anytime soon, after all.
I missed hugs. I missed them a lot. Hugging yourself didn’t release any oxytocin in your body, so it didn’t have the same effect as getting one from another person.
I knew that from experience.
Squeezing the remote, I eyed the atlas on the coffee table one more time and sighed again. If I followed the instructions my grandma had left me, I should have relocated a year ago. For a while there, during high school, we had bounced around every semester. After I’d graduated, we had milked our stays for a year. Then we’d upped it a little more after that. Two years maximum, mi corazón. As long as you keep your head down and tell no one, you should be okay.
That was another rule: keep your head down.
I had. It was a lot of work to keep it that way, but I was alive, and that was the point. That had been the point of all this shit.
But this place was the closest thing to home I’d known in forever. I’d settled in. I had found peace and, honestly, part of myself too while being on my own. It wasn’t exactly at the top of the list of places I would want to live, but I still didn’t want to leave. I was comfortable. I didn’t want to start over for the twentieth time. But….
There was always the chance one day I wouldn’t have to. That’s what I kept hoping for. It was just another miracle I could dream of.
And maybe, eventually, someday, things might change. Maybe I would be able to get a passport and travel and meet someone awesome who didn’t ask too many questions. Find a companion… a friend. More than a friend would be great.
If I had to pick, that would be at the top of the list of things I’d want—someone.
He’d have to be okay with me being… me. Just shy of thirty. Mostly nice. I had a mostly steady job, even if I was never going to be rich. I could have done worse in the face department, I thought. I could have done a lot better, but I could have been unluckier. There was plenty of other stuff I could complain about, so facial features and the size of my waist weren’t worth worrying about.
And that was part of my problem. The source of all my problems actually. There wasn’t a plastic surgeon in the world who could fix my problems with a surgical knife.
I needed a whole new life, new DNA, for that shit.
I was in the middle of thinking that depressing shit when I saw it out of the corner of my eye.
A flash of pure purple light through the blinds that had me flinching it was so damn bright.
And it was a split second after that, that I felt it—the rumble. The frame of the single-wide shook. My cup rattled. The walls trembled.
What in the hell was that?
WHAT THE HELL WAS HAPPENING?
The interview on the TV suddenly popped up in my head.
Was it… an angel?
No, no. It wasn’t.
Was there a meteor shower tonight? Was a plane falling apart?
Oh shit. Oh shit, shit, shit.
Did that explain the blinding light? No. I was pretty sure nothing other than a spotlight could glow that brightly, but what the hell did I know? Did it explain the mini earthquake that had just rattled the trailer? Maybe…? But there was something, and whatever it was, it had to be big to make the ground shake. I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head that could be that big, other than Godzilla, but kaijus weren’t real, so….
There was nothing to be scared of unless it really was chunks of an airplane falling out of the sky, on the verge of crushing me.
Forcing myself to get up, I headed around the couch and went straight for the front door. I grabbed my flashlight, unlocked the door, and peeked before going out there.
But in the same way I should have expected, in the only way that seemed to work in my life, what I expected wasn’t what I actually got.