Nine

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•••

Peneloper, like the rest of you, drives a metaphorical car, and for seventeen years, she's been rambling down a very straight path. And like you, she is prone to mistakes - taking a curve to fast, making a wrong turn, having to change out the occasional flat tire - but at the end of the day, there is the sense that all this driving has a purpose. That the destination will ultimately be worth it.

Now imagine a Heavensley shaped roadblock. He causes you to travel along a road you never have, a road, that until he came along, never existed.

So it's no surprise that Peneloper feels like the car she'd been driving competently for so long has careened off a cliff. She wishes for normalcy, a return to the familiar. A road more traveled, not less. I find her a hopeful sort, much like her father.

That Saturday starts like any other, Peneloper too bleary-eyed to notice her notebook lying on her floor, discarded like incomplete homework or dirty socks. Yawning, she stumbles through the typical genre cliches of an early morning's routine. She monologues in front of the mirror, narrating the shape of her body, and fullness of lip in excruciating detail. She laments her wardrobe choice, a second, third, and fourth time, settling on the eighteenth selection which also happened to be the second outfit she tried on. Her alarm clock begins to blare, an hour into her routine, which is an hour too late, but I've always been of the mind to reward effort.

So brava, alarm clock.

Peneloper eats a traditional Auttsley family breakfast - a meal of many strange textures. The toast is burnt, the eggs goopy and uncooked, however, their edges are charred. The juice is pulpy, though I can find no literature on grapes and their 'pulpy' nature.

Overall, the meal is bland and forgettable. But what is not those things, however, and yet still consists of an equally intriguing mix of textures is what happens next, when Peneloper makes a horrendous discovery.

•Wake Up Call•

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Wake Up Call

Peneloper returned to her room to a most grievous sight: her beloved notebook lying on the floor, its pages splayed, corners folded and torn, a spine too long spent bent that had, undoubtedly compromised its strength, stretch, and longevity. She gasped, something she did not take lightly, and picked up the dear the way a doctor would grab someone's arm when setting a fracture.

As if this scene, so early in the morning, wasn't enough to spoil the whole of her Saturday, it got worse, unbelievably worse. The pages the book had been opened to were blank.
Now, blank pages were often the case for works-in-progress as a great deal of authors liked to write at their leisure, leaving stories to manifest over months or years. But Peneloper was a voracious writer, doing so whenever she could, and especially at those times she shouldn't, school the number one culprit in this instance, and though some of her notebook had yet to be maimed by her scratch, these pages had been written on. She'd been certain.

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