The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves by Richard Heredia Page A

enable
us to outfit all of our lower level characters. Everyone is pretty excited
about that prospect.”
    “ What
time are you guys gonna…. Zerg that fool?” she asked, giggling at the strange
sounding word, bouncing her pencil between her thumb and
forefinger.
    “ I think around eight
tonight.”
    “ Can I watch?” Elena tried
not to sound too enthusiastic. She didn’t want Anthony to think she
was pleading.
    “ We’ll see,” smirked
Anthony. Suddenly, he reached out to tickle Elena on her side. “So,
goofball, what were you thinking about with your eyes?”
    Elena’s smile was broad
and her laughter was heartfelt. Her brother might be a pain in the
butt sometimes, but every once and a while, he let her know he
really did listen to her. He made her feel important in those
times. She knew, deep down, she was important to him also. He just
hid it very well.
    Typical!
    “ Well,” began Elena, “at
school today, we had a new girl show up for our class.”
    “ What’s wrong with that?
Did she have buck-teeth or something?” Anthony joked.
    Elena couldn’t help but
laugh aloud. “ No! She didn’t have buck-teeth,” she replied, trying to stifle
her laughter behind the back of her hand. She wanted to be
irritated and mad. She didn’t want to laugh, but she failed,
miserably. Anthony could always make her laugh, especially when she
didn’t want to.
    “ Okay, she had one
eye?”
    “ No.”
    “ She smelled like a
camel?”
    “ No, it wasn’t anything
like that. Now stop it!” blurted Elena slightly out of breath, her
small chest heaving from her inability to stop giggling.
    “ Well, what’s got your
panties in a bunch?”
    “ My WHAT ?”
exclaimed the little girl, her eyes almost popping out of her
skull.
    “ Never mind, go ahead and
tell me,” answered Anthony, shaking his head in resignation for the
second time.
    “ Well, we had this new
girl today in class, she came from Scandinavia –.”
    “ Her arms must be tired
from all that swimming,” interrupted her brother, laughing himself,
quite proud of his joke.
    “ Tony, stop it!” yelled
Elena, her hands balled at her sides. She stomped a foot on the
rug-covered floor.
    He merely waved for her to
continue.
    “ Anywaaaaay,” began the
girl. “She came from that faraway country and was dressed kinda
weird for school, you know. She wasn’t in uniform. She wore this
funky ribbon-thing around her waist.”
    Anthony thought on this
for a bit. “That doesn’t sound all that bad to me. I mean, she come
from across the ocean, so she’s gonna have different ways of doing
things than we do, right?”
    “ I guess,” thought the
girl aloud. “Her name is Nixy –.”
    “ What kinda name is that?”
It was Anthony’s turn to exclaim.
    “ I don’t know…
Scandinavian, maybe. Duh!” was Elena’s snide reply.
    “ Whatever. It still sounds
pretty lame to me.”
    “ Yeah, most of the kids in
our class were pretty surprised when the teacher told us her name,
but they stayed quiet.” Anthony just nodded as Elena continued.
“She talks different too. You know, she uses words that other kids
don’t use and stuff like that. Plus, she said she lived on top of
the hill.”
    Anthony chuckled again at
that. “At the top of what hill?” he asked quickly, in-between
gurgles of laughter and bouts of furious typing upon his the
keyboard of his laptop.
    “ On this hill, where we
live,” answered the girl.
    “ You mean at the top of
Milbur Drive?”
    “ I thought that’s what she
meant at first, but when Mikalah and I asked her what street, she
said that she just lived at the top. You know no street or
anything. That’s what I thought was really weird,” offered Elena,
shrugging, obviously confused by Nixy’s strange answers to
otherwise simple questions.
    “ You know what makes that
statement even weirder?” said Anthony leaning forward, his eyes
locking on Elena’s own pair. He was no longer interested in making
her laugh.
    “ What?”