“Tim saw the bone fly into the air, and his dog ran away to retrieve it. He was so happy to see his little friend happy again and hoped that Mom would be home soon to join them.”
“Pop!” exclaimed Mrs. Bradford.
The young boy put down the book and scanned his classroom of young peers, all seated behind their gray desks with their reading material placed comfortably in front of them. Some actually lifted their eyes from the page as they heard the teacher stop him; others continued staring off at the wall, as they had been for the past 15 minutes of reading time. As he hummed to himself, his eyes landed on another kid, mindlessly watching the clock hung on the beige wall above the classroom’s door tick away.
“Brody!” the young boy called.
Brody turned away from the clock, and his teacher nodded at him as she pointed to her page. “We’re on, At.”
He looked down at his book. “Uh… At, the, day’s, end, C―Cuh―Cam―Cam-ee―”
“Camelot,” Mrs. Bradford interrupted.
“Camelot, was, so, ti-red, he, fell, ri-gut, as―leep, on, Tim’s, lap.”
“Pop!”
Brody looked at the kids around him, and as he saw one child in particular, a dumb grin bore itself on his face.
“Azura!”
Mrs. Bradford gasped.
The young girl’s head peaked out from behind the cover of her hardback novel, seeming to shiver at the very call of her name. Azura’s cheeks turned scarlet as the class looked straight at her, and Brody giggled across the room, ignoring the blazing glare from his teacher’s fiery eyes.
“Brody!” she scolded.
The kid’s giggles slowly dissipated.
“You apologize to her, right now!”
“Sorry Azura,” he said with a smile.
Azura sunk into her chair and cast her glossy eyes down, away from the sea of classmates suffocating her with their gaze.
The clock soon ticked to 12:30, and the children could escape to recess.
At the time, Azura went to a medium-sized elementary school on the east side in the Honeycutt district. The school sat behind a small hill and by a field lined with trees covering the view of the road, and in that field, not far from the building itself, sat a lonely swing set. Like any other kid, to Azura, recess was an entertaining escape from the usual dragging monotony of her class, but more than that, it allowed her a silent separation from the other children for a brief 15-minute window. While other kids played basketball on the blacktop or tag in the grass, Azura chose to sit solemnly on the swing set, lightly hovering back and forth above the ground, only pushed by the faint whisper of a refreshing autumn breeze on her back.
Using her tin lunchbox as a backdrop, Azura faced her right hand away from herself, resting her fingertips on her palm with her thumb pointed up in the opposite direction. Then, using her pointer finger, she drew a zigzag. A-Z, she repeated in her head. She curled her fingers again, alternating between them and the zigzag as fast as possible. A-Z, A-Z, A-Z. She continued to a new symbol, shooting up her middle and pointer fingers while her thumb held down her ring and pinky. A-Z-U. Going from the U, she moved her pointer before her middle finger and finally spelled A-Z-U-R-A.
She was getting the hang of it.
Azura rested her hand and clicked open her pink tin lunch box. Inside was a plastic sorting container with carrots, strawberries, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a tiny vanilla-frosted cupcake, all of which were placed in front of a sticky note attached to the box’s lid saying, "Happy Birthday! Love, Sotie."
Azura smiled.
“Hey,” a voice said from behind.
She let the box close shut and held it between her legs. She flipped her head around to see Brody with his heavily gelled, spiky hair alongside his friend from outside her class.
She looked at the two and didn’t say a word.
“Why’d you stop talking?” Brody asked.
Azura remained silent, unable to answer his question.
Unsatisfied with his lack of a response, he added, “You used to talk, now Mrs. Bradford says we aren’t supposed to ask you to talk.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“I think she got an infection in her mouth,” said his friend.
“Really?! Gross! Is that true?”
Azura shook her head. She began to wonder if that was what everyone thought had happened.
“Is it something else wrong with you?”
The timid creaking of the swing set spoke for her as the two boys breathed through their mouths, watching her stare at the ground and waiting for her to signal the response she did not want to express. She let her neck loosen to give one sluggish nod, then pressed her pointer finger to her throat.
“If something is wrong with your neck you should do a spell to fix it!”
She shook her head.
“She prolly can’t do magic! My dad says you haffuh be born special to do it,” his friend added with unbound consideration.
“If you can’t do magic then you could have someone else fix you.”
Azura’s frown turned even gloomier, and she gave the boys another weak shake of her head.
“Why?” Brody pressed on.
Despite being unable to speak, she had already told the two more than they deserved to hear.
“Do you wanna see my wand?” Brody reached into the pocket of his trousers and slipped out a tiny wooden stick the size of his palm, which, upon his careless yank, extended outwards to about a foot in length. “I got it for Christmas, I’ve been practicing, with it! Watch what I can do!”
The young kid swung around and extended his arm to point the stick at his friend's face, who stood eagerly. Brody gave his wrist a light shake, and from the tip of the wand, a tiny breeze shot itself at the child’s face, causing his hair to flow behind his head like he was being hit by a blow drier. The boys finished their giggling, and the wind relented as Brody retracted his wrist.
He turned back to Azura. “My dad says it’s emelental magic. And I can blow hard too! Wanna get pushed?”
Azura’s weak face soon turned terrified, and she swung her head from side to side with enough force to slap her cheeks with her pigtails.
The boys giggled. “Come on, come on!”
Brody leaped behind her and punched the swing forward with wind that boomed in her ears. She squeezed the swing’s chains and tightly pressed her lunchbox between her thighs, bracing herself as the swing fell backward.
“Push harder, harder!”
Brody aimlessly flicked his wrist, and another burst erupted from the wand, throwing her higher than before.
The boys laughed and cheered.
Azura begged them to stop, but not the quietest sound left her mouth.
The kids in the field kept playing.
Not a soul looked toward her from the blacktop.
“Higher!”
The wind blasted into her back again, sending her even higher.
The boys roared with laughter.
As the swing fell, Azura pressed her feet into the ground to get off the swing set, but as she took one shaky step forward, the force of the wand punched her again and sent her and her lunch box crashing into the dirt.
“Ooo!” the boys sneered before scurrying away toward the blacktop.
Tears streamed down the little girl’s face as she pushed herself off the ground and grabbed her open lunch box, the contents of which were littered across the dirt. As she cried, she grabbed the loose food and put it back in her box, picking up her carrots, strawberries, and one smushed vanilla cupcake.
The children soon found themselves moving back inside the building in single file lines, uneagerly awaiting the next two and a half hours of the day.
Brody was last to reenter Mrs. Bradford’s class, and as he slumped back into his seat, she announced, “Alright class, get out your independent reading books, in 10 minutes we are going to go regroup and share!”
His sight filled with students pulling books out from backpacks and setting them down flat on their desks with the pages split open evenly between the two covers.
He let out a loud sigh, then pulled out his crayons and scratch paper and began doodling.
“Brody!” He finished his scribble, then turned his head to face Mrs. Bradford, who stood behind him with Azura by her side, book in hand. “Azura wanted to have a partner to help her read aloud, and she asked for you! Are you okay being her buddy?”
Brody stared at the both of them. “Um… okay.”
“Great!”
Azura took the seat beside him, as his usual desk partner was skimming through his novel on the class’s beanbag. She opened her book, and started reading without giving a single glance to Brody.
He didn’t give any attention to her, either, and went about his doodles. The two sat in silence together until the ten minutes was up.
Soon after Mrs. Bradford alerted the class their time had finished, students began to go to the front of the classroom and read short excerpts from their stories.
“Inside the treasure chest there was a big pile of gold coins! “We’re rich!” said Cory. The friends left the cave and danced together, watching the sun set behind the hill. They were so happy, that they even spared some of the gold for Molly!”
The room filled with a soft applause, and the young boy found his seat.
“Very good Ian! Azura, would you like to go up with Brody?” Mrs. Bradford looked to the two.
Azura nodded to her, and got up to stand at the front of the room while Brody loitered at his seat, before moseying over to Azura at the sight of the teacher’s stare.
“Brody, would you read please?” Mrs. Bradford asked.
He looked to Azura, and she handed him her book. He looked at the cover, trying to make out the title, but had no luck deciphering what it said, only the face of some monster beneath the letters, Frankenstein.
He flipped to the first page, and froze.
He looked to Mrs. Bradford, who nodded at him to start reading.
He swallowed, and began.
“Uhm… You, will, re…jo,ciky, to, he-ar, that, no, dis… disa…”
Out of the corner of his eye Brody could make out the kids’ funny faces, looking to one another confused by what they were hearing, while failing to not find it amusing
“disas…ter, has, a… a-cuh-com, ac, acuh-comp-en… com… acuh-com…”
The class couldn’t contain themselves any longer, and started to giggle aloud as the boy struggled to form a single complete word before them.
“a-cuh-comp-an…eyed.. the… com… com, com, com… com”
As he stuttered away, Azura couldn’t stop a tiny grin from forming on her face.