Page 1 of Avelina

Chapter One

Once upon a time in the Kingdom of Hartha, there was a girl named Linorra Dragonrider. She was a smart girl, but young and naive. She believed that the world she lived in was all there was, and that she was the master of that world. She never thought that anything difficult or terrible would ever happen to her. She was wrong.

I don’t remember much from the day of my accident, but I remember Rogue barking furiously. He was somewhere in the woods, running farther and farther away as I lay on the rocky trail, facing a sky as brilliant and blue as a Steller’s jay. I squinted up at the brightness, tracking that very bird as it flew toward the sun. Its wings beat a hectic hwa-hwa-hwa as it fled, as spooked as my horse had been. The silky, gold-tipped grass around me waved from the gust it kicked up as if to say “Farewell, little bird.” Its silvery black head was all that stood out against the sky before it disappeared entirely.

I awoke to a sharp stabbing in the right side of my chest. My throat and lungs burned each time I sucked in a breath, which was difficult, given the tube in my throat. It was like trying to breathe through a straw. My right wrist throbbed with pain, but I couldn’t see it clearly through the goop in my eyes. My hands, hot and sweaty, were stuffed into puffy white mittens. The rest of me was freezing, especially my feet.

Sunlight streamed into the room from a window on my left, brightening the sterile white room into something incongruently cheerful. My mother stood in front of the window, facing away from me. She pushed a suction cup against the glass to attach the crystal prism that usually hung in our kitchen window. It caught the light and scattered colors around the room. The rainbow cut across the white walls like a scalpel.

I tried to speak, then remembered the tube. Mom heard me stir and turned to face me. I reached out to her, and she smiled but didn’t come closer. A pretty, red-haired nurse in blue scrubs was on my right, leaning over me to wipe the ointment from around my eyes.

“Avelina, you’re waking up from sedation,” said the nurse. Her voice was gentle and clear, but a little too loud, as if she were used to talking exclusively to elderly people. “We’re gonna try to get that breathing tube out, okay?”

I nodded. I didn’t care about the tube nearly as much as getting those disgusting mitts off my hands so I could scratch my face.

“Can you pick your head up off the pillow?” she asked, and I did. “Good! I think you’re ready, you just need to wake up a little more, okay? Are you in pain?”

I nodded again, thinking, What a dumb question.

“Okay, I’m gonna keep a little bit of pain medicine going for you, but not too much. I’ll come back in a bit and check on you.” Quietly to my mom, she added, “You can go stand next to her. It’s okay. It’s good for her to see a familiar face while she wakes up.”

“Thank you,” she responded. The nurse scuttled through the large sliding glass door to the right of my bed.

My mother, Giana, wore dark jeans and a green T-shirt that had a picture of her own bay horse, Gem. It was her lucky T-shirt, the one she’d designed for the family business, Silverstone Stables. It was rumpled and had a coffee stain on the bottom. Dark circles showed prominently below her hazel eyes, and loose strands of straight black hair hung from a messy bun perched high on her head. Somehow, she managed to make it work.

My father used to call her a timeless beauty. With smooth, caramel skin that never progressed past the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, her age was always difficult to pinpoint. We were roughly the same height, but that’s where the similarity ended. I have fair skin and my hair is a chestnut brown that turns auburn when I get too much sun. Plus, I have a dimple in just one cheek that makes my face asymmetrical when I smile. Dad used to call me a genetic anomaly, but he swore it wasn’t because of the dimple.

“Time for you to wake up, lazy bones,” Mom said as she walked to the foot of my bed. It was the same thing she used to say to me when I was a kid. She pulled out some soft woolen socks and tugged them onto my feet.

I motioned to the walls around me with my mitted hands, trying to ask where I was and what had happened. She had no idea what I was trying to say.

“Dad will be back in a minute. He always steps out two minutes before people come in to say important things. I’m sure the doctor will be here before he gets back from the bathroom.” She must have been nervous because that was a lot of talking for her. A chunky jade and malachite ring adorned her left index finger, and she absentmindedly rubbed the stones with the thumb of her right hand.

I gave up on communicating and closed my eyes. A few minutes passed and my mom let me rest. She was good like that.

The nurse eventually returned, followed by a dark-skinned physician, who leaned over me to press a stethoscope against my chest. The doctor smelled strongly of lemon, like the scent of the cleaning products that I hoped the hospital used. She peered down her long nose at me, nodded her head, then walked back out without a word, nearly bumping into my father, Alberto. The nurse remained behind and gathered a few supplies, pulling out a blue paper mat the size of a dinner napkin to lay on my chest.

“What I miss?” my dad asked. Mom rolled her eyes. He chuckled and sat down in a boxy chair pushed into the corner of the room.

Another woman, the respiratory therapist, I believe, came to stand across the bed from the nurse. She fiddled with the breathing tube, did something with an empty syringe, then pulled off the stickers that held the tube onto my face.

“Okay, one, two, three!” the therapist said enthusiastically and yanked the tube out, as if pulling a foot-long plastic tube out of someone’s throat was the most natural thing in the world.

I coughed violently as she set the monstrous thing on the paper mat and wrapped it up to be thrown away. Every cough sent lightning into my ribs and out through my back. I gasped for air while the disconnected ventilator dinged insistently. The respiratory therapist sucked foamy slime out of my mouth with a suction wand thingy while the nurse slipped oxygen tubing around my ears and into my nose.

“Good job, Avelina,” the nurse said as she untied the mittens, tossing them into the garbage. “Cough that stuff up. Don’t try to talk right away. Your throat will be irritated from the breathing tube, but your oxygen levels are good. I’ll come back in a couple minutes, okay?” She got her own stethoscope out, listened to my lungs again, then left the room with the respiratory therapist.

My dad stood up and walked over to the foot of the bed. “Look at you!” he said in that Spanish accent everyone loved. “You are a survivor!” He smiled his usual genuine smile, but his eyes were red, and his face had a few days’ growth of patchy beard.

My father was a proud Spaniard, from Málaga, but his grandmother, who helped raise him, was from Scotland. He used to say that explained our mutual blue eyes as well as his impeccable English. He was about five-nine with shoes on but was always a giant in my mind, one of those inexplicably likable people who could put you at ease immediately, no matter what was happening. He smiled down at me, then at my mom. I could see his bald spot shining with sweat despite the cold room.

Mom glided over to stand next to him, and he wrapped an arm around her waist. She leaned on him a little, staring at the fat tube jutting out of my right rib cage, just under my armpit. She didn’t say anything, reverting to her usual MO.

“You were asleep for three days. Can you believe it?” Dad asked.

“My back can,” I croaked as I stretched out. Even at the age of twenty-six, three days in a hospital bed took its toll. “My chest hurts right in the middle.”

“Well, Fanny trampled you,” he said, “and, uh, you died for a minute.”

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