S.S.S.

So, I'm writing a YA that I'm sort of digging right now and figured this would be a great place to share. :D  It's still untitled, which I need to change... but, here ya go... first page of my Carnival Saga~

 

“This is it.”

Flint DeLuca stared into her father’s excited brown eyes as he slapped the folded newspaper down on the kitchen table, sending her spoon sailing through the air to land with a plink on the nasty 80’s linoleum tile.

Now, instead of eating a bowl of cornflakes, she was wearing the bowl of cornflakes.

Hissing, she reached across the narrow kitchen and snatched the faded blue dishrag off the sink to swipe at her Team Edward shirt. She sighed, biting back an aggravated retort.

Like the fact that she’d had to babysit the Smith’s brats two nights in a row just to afford it. “Dad,” she groaned.

He ran blunt fingers through his spiky hair. “Sorry, baby, sorry. But look,” he tapped the newspaper.

“I need to work, Flint. That’s what I know, that’s what I can do.”

She smelled like milk. Great. She couldn’t go to school smelling like this. First day of her Junior year, just freaking peachy. Now what was she gonna wear?

Tossing the rag away, she glanced at the highlighted article. He’d circled it in red, as if she couldn’t have pieced together which article had made him this excited. Dad only loved three things in the world.

Mom. Her. And the carnival. Especially a carnival in need of flyers. Or trapeze artists as most non-carni folks called them.

She sighed. “I thought you said no more of this, Dad. After Mom--”

He clenched his jaw, ten days worth of stubble looking sort of gray in the dimly lit galley kitchen.

It wasn’t easy for either of them. Mom’s accident. It’d happened five years ago, and Flint had finally stopped having the nightmare of watching her mom plummet to her death from the fifty foot high tight rope. She missed her mom, but it was no longer the jagged ache it once was.

But it was different for her dad. She didn’t think he’d ever get over it.

He’d started drinking again. He tried to hide it. She was pretty sure he didn’t want her to know he’d fallen off the wagon, but it was pretty obvious when she’d come home and find him passed out on their ratty sofa, t.v. on and breathe reeking of Scotch.

Happy reading!
~Marie :)