Stellar

Chapter 4

Over the next few days, there was no sign of the boy or the gateway. Petra tried to follow her normal routine. Wake up, school, walk Milo, dinner, TV, bed and repeat. But things felt different. She was more distracted and the routine she was once happy to follow, now felt mundane.

The thoughts of Silva Hollow constantly occupied her mind, and she was finding it hard to keep it all to herself. Petra felt like she was going mad. Ruby still thought she was making it all up and if she, the person she trusted the most, didn't believe her Petra didn't know who would.

She needed someone to help her make sense of all of this. She tried to think of ways to convince someone, anyone, of what she saw but nothing came to mind.

The walk to school was quiet. Ruby walked along, earbuds in until she caught up with her friend. Petra walked a few steps behind and spent the walk doing the same thing she had done for the past few days, replaying the events of her trip to Silva Hollow. Although today her mind seems to want to focus on the actual gateway. Visions of purple overwhelmed her mind. She relived the feeling of smoke filling her lungs and the slow reveal of Silva Hollow.

What she couldn't understand was how it was there one minute and gone the next. She racked her brain for any details she may have missed but found she was starting to remember less and less of it. All the little details she tried so hard to commit to memory were beginning to vanish. She knew Kai had done something before she returned to Earth, but she just couldn't remember what it was.

Petra was in a daze, she hardly remembered any of the morning's lessons. A pencil twiddled between her fingers as she stared out of the window, trying to figure out who would believe what Ruby labelled as 'her story'.

"Petra, are you listening?" Robin, Petra's best friend, asked in what Petra assumed was English judging by her surroundings. Although she wasn't sure how she got there or what she was supposed to be doing.

"Yeah, remind me what we are supposed to be doing again?" Robin threw her a quizzical look.

"We're planning out stories?" Robin picked up her pen and began to scribble in her English book and as usual, was full of ideas.

"Yeah of course, what are you doing yours about?" Petra asked banging her arm on the side of Robin's electric wheelchair as she bent down to get her pencil case out of her bag.

"I think I'm going to write a wizard, you?" Robin crossed out some over ideas and underlined others as the story was forming in her mind.

Then it dawned on Petra that she had the most perfect story to write about. She can write about Silva Hollow. At least then it would be out of her head and she may be able to start to focus again.

"Umm, I think I'm going to write about a girl who finds a gateway to another land." Petra looked up at Robin for a response but was only met by Robin thinking out lough

She bombarded Petra with her ideas about a wizard who is trying to take over the kingdom and a princess that needed to stop him. She went into detail about all the weird magic he can do to the kingdom and then went off on a tangent about how she thinks her aunt is a witch.

Petra wasn't sure why she hadn't thought of it before. If anyone was going to believe her it would be Robin, she was her best friend after all. During their first conversation, Robin had told her about the fact she thinks aliens exist.

She made the decision to talk to Robin over lunch and carried on with the lesson, hoping that she could make it through before getting distracted or getting detention.

So as soon as she sat at their usual table in the cafeteria, she prepared her rehearsed speech, going over it once more in her mind while Robin adjusted her wheelchair so she was sitting directly opposite her.