Looking forward to the release of my next novella, Sweet Dream, Bitter Reality? You can find out more about it here! But if you’re curious about the book, why not have a little taste right now? This is the prologue to Sweet Dream, Bitter Reality–or ‘Chapter 0’, as I’m calling it. I hope you enjoy this little introduction to my next novella!
Chapter 0
The car door slammed shut. Evie flinched, eyes firmly staring at the back of the driver’s seat. Outside the car, life reigned: growling vehicles, flickering streetlights, shouting kids and screeching bike tyres. Inside the metal cocoon, she was safe.
“Out, princess,” the door to her right opened abruptly, sending a gust of cold air to attack her body. “Don’t be expecting special treatment.”
Princess. A word describing a female, despite the negative connotations. Awkwardness could be so easily mistaken for other things—like expecting ‘special treatment’. Evie didn’t want to be treated like a princess. Just a person. Just a girl.
That demand had been considered unreasonable in the old house.
“Thank you,” she murmured, her hands disappearing into a large hoodie pocket as she clumsily shuffled off the car seat and onto the street. Black tarmac. Orange streetlights, like little contained fires, stared down silently. They blinked.
This girl was new. They didn’t know her.
They hadn’t seen the long, blonde curls, tucked into a soft hood. It was lined with fluff that kept her head warm, a little worn from ten-too-many washes. They hadn’t seen the trainers, messy pink marker pen filling in some of the white stripes. Even the fingers, bony and littered with faint scar tissue patches, were unknown to them.
She wasn’t unknown to him, though. Evie had seen the large man, the driver of the car, many times before. When he was small. When he had chubby cheeks and sad eyes. When he was called Jamie by his two friends who lived on the other estate—the posh one.
He was James, now. Older. Taller. Sterner.
But still just as kind as he was back then.
“Number twenty-eight,” he called back to her, already walking up a gravel path to a frontdoor. She was still making her way around the car, stepping onto a pavement busy with chalk drawings of hopscotch squares and genitalia. “Don’t forget.”
She nodded, noticing the slowly closing gate and hurrying to catch it. James fought with the frontdoor’s lock. The frontdoor barked. Evie shivered and crossed her arms over her chest, glancing back at the street. It seemed like a copy of the one she’d just left.
Residential. Kids racing around on scooters and bikes. Cars jammed up and down the pavement, tyres up on the kerb. No one was looking at her. It wasn’t school. They didn’t care about a new person—they wouldn’t even notice that she was new. Nobody knew everybody, not any more.
Save for a handful of nosy, elderly neighbours, no one cared.
“Mind the dog,” he said, as he wrenched the door open and released a barrel-bodied grey blur into the front garden.
Evie froze. The dog leapt at her, using her legs as a rest for its paws. Its head was wide, the mouth smiling. Tongue out. Not a threat. Of course it wasn’t. It was James’ dog, which meant it was owned and loved and fed. It wasn’t some random monster from a video game.
From a video game.
Jamie—James used to play video games. Maybe he’d let her play one. Maybe he’d given them up years ago. How was she meant to know? All she could be sure of was his kindness, and his acceptance. That was all she needed, for then.
A little hesitant, she patted the dog’s head, looking into its dark eyes. There was no malice in them. Just friendliness. Excitement. Everything a nice dog would feel upon meeting a new friend.
She was a new friend, wasn’t she? There to stay?
That was up to James.
“Down, Kitty, down!” James laughed, semi-nervously, hauling ‘Kitty’, the dog, off Evie with one arm. When he turned back to Evie, his cheeks looked a little flushed. “I didn’t name her.”
“I like her.” Evie smiled carefully, meeting his eyes and hoping her expression was acceptable. Acceptable. A word to be left in the past.
Maybe. She’d not even entered the house yet. The new house.
James waved her in and walked back to the car, yelling a greeting at a passing, honking car. Kitty loped down to the gate, then back to the frontdoor, spinning in a circle before trotting after the newcomer.
It was a slim house. Evie let her fingertips trail across the wall, painted a soft blue colour, as she wandered down the hall. One doorway to her left, no door, revealed a small living-room. Sofa, fireplace, TV.
She decided to perch on the sofa and was promptly squashed by Kitty.
The frontdoor slammed as she manouvered around the dog, wondering if it would be rude to turn on the TV. Best to wait. A framed football shirt hung over the fireplace; memories of family photos plastered all over the walls of the old house made her shiver. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t there.
She wouldn’t be there ever again. Hopefully. Everything was riding on her staying calm and polite and respectful, everything that old people wanted children to be. For as long as James would have her—for as long as it took for her to turn eighteen and support herself. Maybe it would be earlier. They didn’t teach you about legal moving out ages in school.
“You can put something on,” he said, appearing in the doorway. Two backpacks, both purple, decorated his shoulders. A soft smile painted her lips.
“Thanks,” she responded, her eyes finding the remote and her fingers pressing the red button at the top. Not everything was different. Just the important things.
“Gotta do a couple things, y’know,” he moved into the room and sat on the other side of the sofa, depositing the backpacks on the floor and becoming a new target for Kitty. The dog unceremoniously flopped onto his lap. “School and that, social services. Medicentre. Dentist. Boring stuff.”
“I gotta move school,” she said quietly, but it was less of a question and more of a realisation. Kitty yawned.
“Yeah.” He stretched and leaned back onto the sofa. “I’ll sort it. There was, though,” all of a sudden, he sat up straight and scratched the back of his neck, Kitty huffing at the movement and transferring herself back onto Evie’s lap, “this other thing. I was thinking while I was driving, Paul’s kids—Paul is a mate, work mate—go to this club, at the library. Town centre. Don’t know much about it,” he leaned back again, shrugging, “but you could try it. Help you settle in, make friends, all that.”
“A school thing?” She asked cautiously.
“Sounded more like a council thing, the way he put it,” he shook his head. “Tea?”
Kitty barked.
“Not you, idiot,” James patted her back and laughed once, his cheeks going red again, “and not that sort of tea. Brown liquid?”
Evie giggled at the wording, the absurdity catching her off guard. She nodded. He nodded. She considered how weird it was, being back in his presence and talking to him after so much time apart. He might’ve thought the same thing—she wasn’t a mind-reader. Kitty was likely wondering about the food she was promised just moments ago.
He stood up and left her with Kitty and the TV, until Kitty leapt off the sofa and trotted after him. Evie looked down at the backpacks he’d brought in, considering their contents. Her life. Clothes and books, one phone charger with a tattered end, various small bits of makeup—easy to hide—and another pair of shoes. Odds and ends. A stuffed toy which fit in her palm.
A little cat with elastic-like whiskers. Faded fur. Bead eyes. By her side since she was born.
Everything she could grab in those adrenaline-fuelled minutes, filled with screaming and hot tears and banging doors. Threats and phone calls. A desparate text to a number she hadn’t looked at in years.
please come and get me
sit tight, be there in a few
She didn’t know how much he knew. How many of the arguments he’d been told about. What aspects of her life had been revealed to him. But she suspected it was more than she’d told him, considering she’d never told him anything concrete at all.
She still hadn’t. But he knew her name. He used it without hesitating. It meant the world to her; it might have just been another rebellion against their parents from him, a seized opportunity by a bitter older brother.
Still. He arrived. Rolled up in his car and opened the door. Never even got out.
He rescued her.
“Forgot how you like your tea,” with two mugs balanced in either hand, James walked slowly into the living-room, handing one to Evie. Kitty hopped up onto the sofa and settled between them, the excitement of a stranger arriving clearly wearing off.
He couldn’t have forgotten, because he never knew. She didn’t drink tea when he still lived in the family home, a terraced house half on a cul-de-sac and half facing a main road. On the edge.
She drank lemonade and juice. Kid stuff. Ten-year-old stuff. Details which a tired eighteen-year-old, fresh out of college and into a job at a garage, didn’t pay attention to. He was busy preparing a new life, in a new town, far away from the parents he disliked.
Too controlling, or dramatic. Argumentative, or cold. His wording changed every time he was asked about it.
Evie sipped her tea—hot, black, fine but could’ve done with some sugar—and stared at the TV. A dog competition stared back at her, owners making their pets do tricks and judges commenting on their performances. The perfect TV show, completely bland and the opposite of controversial. Kitty didn’t seem interested.
“There’s a guest-room, upstairs,” James said, stroking Kitty’s back with one hand, “kinda like a box room. Like Callum’s room.”
“Callum moved into my room,” Evie remembered the day—not dissimilar to what she’d just experienced, mere hours ago. Noise. Lots and lots of noise, then an absence.
This time, it was her. Last time, it was him.
Different reasons. Different situations. The same premise.
Child leaves home.
“And you got mine,” he sighed, “well, you got another of mine. It’ll be alright, Evie, I’ll sort it all out.”
An odd sensation began to tremble through Evie’s face, buzzing underneath her eyes and through her nose. She hadn’t cried since she got in the car. She hadn’t cried since the door shut and she knew she was safe. Her tears drenched the purple carpet in her old room and her hoodie sleeves, but they hadn’t fallen since she’d left.
They began to fall again. Her sleeves flew to her face to catch them.
“Oh, Evie,” he pushed Kitty out of the way, paused for a second, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders, “I’ll sort it all out. It’ll be alright—everything’s gonna be okay.”
“You—you don’t, you don’t mind?” Her words, broken up by the sobs wracking her body, made Kitty whine. Her nose poked the girl’s leg, curious and seemingly sympathetic. “You don’t—everything? You don’t—”
“I don’t,” he squeezed her shoulders, “I don’t mind. Not that I went back home for you. Not that you’re not like you used to be. Not that Mum and Dad are kicking up a fuss. I’ll never mind looking out for my sister, y’know.”
“That word,” she whispered, “that—sister, that—makes me—happy.”
“Thought it would,” he chuckled, sitting up but keeping his arm around her. “You are my sister, though. I’m not just tryna make you feel better—though I am, I guess. You know what I mean. I respect who you are. Trans and all that. You know.”
“I know,” she smiled faintly, rubbing away tears. Her eyes ached. She’d cried enough that day for a lifetime, or maybe two. But it was over. It was all over.
Closing her eyes, she listened to a dog getting told off for not sitting right on the TV and tried to enjoy that singular moment of peace. Life had been nothing but chaos for so long, but she could relax now. Fate had been cruel—but it couldn’t last. Not with James. Not in a quiet house with a new life. New town, new school, new nights of sleeping without constantly worrying.
It would all be okay, she hoped.
Author’s Note – This is a draft of a to-be-published work. The content may be altered or changed prior to publishing. This is not indicative of the exact content of the published work.
OSKAR LEONARD
Oskar Leonard 
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