After Ever After

My Book

After Ever After
a novel

Madeline Fiol

Dedicated To MacKenzie Simpson:
My cousin, friend, and editor
Who was the first to read my book, and would not let me give up
A thousand thanks, girl!
Could not have done it without you

Prologue

Maybe I never knew the real world until the day we left. Maybe the place I lived in before was just a misconception, a fairy tale reflection. We didn't move far away. Same town. Same blustery day, but into a new galaxy. This new place means a new school, new neighbors, a new street.
It's a lone street, though not lone from lack of people. Cars roll by every minute. It is lone from underappreciation. No one stops to notice it, to make it something special, so years waste all its beauty away.
Back at my old street, the one brimming with life, I was the girl everyone gathered around, who everyone loved. Our house, a comfortable sort of place, was always full of people, friends flooding in and out. They made the place beautiful, but Mom and Dad didn't think so. It's empty now. For the first time, it is empty. There's no one passing through calling, "Star," because that's what they always called me. No more star. All that is left is Gadella, my real name. Real, but as unknown to me as moon to sun. I know three things about Gadella. One, she is an artist. Two, she loves everyone and everything that will not push her away. Three, she is an Owel.
Those are the only things I know about myself. They are the only scraps of truth still left after my mask was torn. Without my friends, my neighborhood, my home, I am nobody. Gadella is nobody to me, nobody but a part of this family, an artist, an acceptor, and an Owel.
Since I was little, I've always been told that being an Owel is a gift. I am born into a special race of people. We are protectors. We protect commoners from the truth. Death is a secret, a big word we're never allowed to speak in public. It hovers around us every day, echoing in our lives, waiting to take us, but we protect the common people from it.
What's the biggest problem with life? Death. So death is a secret. Commoners must never know about it.
Father says I am special, but it's the commoners that are special, not I. They live in their own beautiful world. No death to scare them. No death to shake them. No death to burn into their hearts.
I am going to die someday. Everyone will. Fight all you can, but in the end, death always seems to win. Then why am I the special one? Why fight this unknown end?
The sun has a meaning. The moon has a meaning. Even the forlorn street outside my window has a meaning. What about me? Am I really a nobody in this scopeless universe?
Gadella

Chapter One

If I could write out my story in a book, I would leave myself out. I'm the one whose face is always cut out of selfies. I'm the one whose face belongs only to the crowd, not to an individual. I can't even comfort myself with the knowledge that I'm unique, because I'm not. Nothing sets me apart from other girls, at least not that I can see.
My twin brother is the opposite. When people meet Bobby, they adore him and never forget him. He's the knight, the king, and the dragon of the story all at once.
"The world is not full of happy endings. This world doesn't know what happiness is."
Those are the scribbled words sprawled across a sheet of paper in Bobby's journal.
Bobby is my only sibling. He's the kid I argue with, who I get in scrapes with, who I fall back on when no one else is there. But Bobby is strange. He gets stranger the older he gets. Trying to hide that strangeness from Mom and Dad is a lost cause by now. They see it too. All I want is for my brother to be normal again. It hasn't always been this way. Once, a long time ago, he wasn't so different, but slowly that changed. The strangeness came, and now it's hard to remember him as a normal kid.
I peek through the attic window outside at a street...at rows of buildings...at the cotton-colored sky. Every building reminds me of a collage of pictures, pictures with pages and pages of stories behind them.
My thoughts scroll back to psychology class yesterday. I remember it all too well.