The Ending Beginnings: Clara (An Ending Series Novella) (The Ending Series) by Lindsey Fairleigh, Lindsey Pogue

 
    1
     
     
    Without
taking her eyes from her book, Clara reached for her chocolate milk, which was
sitting on the laminate cafeteria table beside her tattered backpack. Lips
pursed around the straw and her feet bouncing with happy anticipation, she took
two long pulls of the rich, cold liquid until her straw made a slurping sound,
and she set the empty carton back down on the table. All of the other students
were out in the quad, fussing about their homework or gushing about boys or
complaining about the teachers they didn’t like, but Clara had better things to
do. She ignored the ceaseless giggling and chatter as it trickled in through
the open cafeteria doors and lost herself in her book.
    “It
was very late; yet the little mermaid could not take her eyes from the ship, or
from the beautiful prince.” She read each line with more passion and longing
than was probably natural for a thirteen-year-old girl, but she couldn’t help
it. Fairy tales…Prince Charming…happily ever afters…she loved it all. “He is
certainly sailing above,” she read softly. “He on whom my wishes depend, and in
whose hands I should like to place the happiness of my life.”
    Clara
thought about Patrick, about his dreamy black hair and his light brown eyes,
which always seemed to be saying more than his words ever did.
    She
sighed and kept reading. “I will venture all for him, and to win an immortal
soul…”
    Clara
smiled as she devoured line after line, every word resonating in her soul,
giving her hope that there was another life out there, a life different from the
one she had with her mom—a better, easier life.
    After
another sigh, she stretched her legs out under the table, wiggling her toes in
her holey converse and crossing her legs at the ankles, and settled in for a
few more pages before the bell rang, signaling the end of lunch.
    “‘But
if you take away my voice,’ said the little mermaid, ‘what is left for me?’
‘Your beautiful form,’ said the witch. ‘Your graceful walk and your expressive eyes.
Surely with these you can enchain a man’s heart.’”
    Clara
paused and wrinkled her nose. Your form? Your graceful walk? That
didn’t seem right. It sounded too much like something her mom would say.
    With
a shrug, she pushed her glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose and continued
reading. The little mermaid was so passionate, so sure about the prince. Clara
longed for the day when she felt that way for someone. Or rather, she longed
for the day when someone felt that way about her …
    Daydreams
of Patrick flitted into her mind, and she closed her eyes, imagining what it
would feel like to run her hand over his spikey hair. He seemed so mysterious.
He was popular and seemingly untouchable, so she guessed that had something to do
with it. But there was also the way he looked at her sometimes, his gaze
lingering a little too long and his mouth curving into that tiny smirk he
seemed to reserve for her alone. Clara was pretty sure he thought about her…at
least more than not at all.
    And
there was that one time at the bus stop, when they’d been waiting under the
awning to stay out of the rain. She could never forget the feeling of his soft
skin, still tanned from a summer of baseball games played under the afternoon
sun, as his arm had brushed against hers. Although she’d been freezing all day
because she’d forgotten a coat, it had only taken that one moment, that single,
fleeting contact, for her incessant shivers to seem completely worth it.
    Clara
giggled. Maybe Patrick was her soul mate, her happily ever after; he just
didn’t know it yet. But as quickly as the thought fluttered into her mind, it
fluttered away.
    “Men
are pigs, Clara Bear.” Her mom’s voice was grating in her mind. “They’re
only as good as the size of their wallet.” Like sand in a windstorm, all of Clara’s
whimsical thoughts of her Prince Charming blew away. Her mom clearly didn’t
believe fairy tales, but then