Darling Charming: Finally Extraordinary

10: A Mix of Hot Cocoa and Emotions

At six o'clock, my parents called Annie and I down for dinner. The smell of roast beef and brown gravy had been wafting up through the castle from the kitchen for so long I thought I was going to explode if I had to wait any longer.

When I asked Annie if she wanted to race each other down to the dining hall, she was ecstatic and overjoyed to. We spent practically all day today telling stories about our siblings- or, rather, Annie told me whatever she could remember about her older sister Elsie and I told her silly and stupid stories about Dexter and Daring to cheer her up.

Annie had said that in every memory she could think of about she and Elsie, it always involved snow in the wintertime; things like skating over a frozen lake, making snow angels, or building a snowman. I thought it was peculiar at first but then I realized that Annie's story, the one that she isn't allowed to know about, is the newly added Disney's version of the Snow Queen, otherwise known as Frozen. This was the first time ever that this story was being repeated, and the rule is that the younger sister must not be told her destiny so that she doesn't know about her older sister's ice powers (with the exception being that the younger sister can know about the powers until the "incident" happens, causing a white streak to appear in the younger sister's hair and her memories of the powers being altered). Annie has a white streak in her hair already and doesn't seem to know her sister has powers (assuming that she does), so my guess is that the story has already started.

I thanked the fairy godmothers that I had borrowed the book on Annie's story from the library and have already returned it, or else she might have found it on my bookshelf and read through it and the whole story would be doomed.

I got to the dining hall before Annie did, so she was a good sport and declared me the winner while I took a bow. We laughed about it as we took our seats.

My mom and dad entered and swiftly sat in their seats. Dinner was soon served. I'd taken maybe two bites before my dad cleared his throat, usually indicating my brothers or I were doing something wrong or he had news to share. I couldn't think of anything I was doing wrong in this very moment so he must have had news.

Once mom, Annie, and I had turned our attention away from our food and to him, he started speaking. "I have some good news about Annie's family. We found your parents' ship, and they arrived safely home to Arendelle a little over an hour ago."

"Yay!" Annie and I cheered, high-fiving.

My dad cleared his throat again, which means there's more news. With my dad, good news always comes before bad news. So unless this is more good news... Yikes.

"There's also some bad news. When your parents arrived home, they discovered your sister was missing," dad shared.

"W-what?" Annie stuttered. Her face got red and puffy, there were tears in her eyes and her bottom lip stuck out, like she was about to cry.

"There are people searching for her, but nothing has been found yet. I suggested to your parents that you be enrolled at Ever After High with Darling as soon as possible so they can hocus focus on finding your sister. I hope that's okay," dad finished, wiping his hands on the napkin in his lap (they weren't even dirty) and continuing to eat.

I tried to hide my hexcitement the best I could when he said "enrolled at Ever After High with Darling as soon as possible", since I know this is a lot on Annie's plate right now. She finds out her parents are okay, but that they're really not since they're on a desperate search for their oldest daughter, and that she can't go home to see them until they figure out what happened and can be sure it won't happen again to Annie this time. On top of that, attending a whole new (BOARDING) school is a lot of pressure on a girl.

We finished dinner in silence. Now and again a tear would fall from Annie's eyes or she would sniffle sadly, and I spent the rest of the dinner thinking up ways to cheer Annie up later.

*

"So, Annie, do you like movies?" I asked, returning to my bedroom from the walk-in closet with a large bin of movies.

Annie had cried for about twenty minutes when we left the dinner table, and I had almost cried with her, sitting on the floor, hugging her and telling her it would be okay and that they would find her sister. Now it was cheer-up time.

"Yes. We don't have a lot of them at home, so sometimes watching them gets boring, but you have more here than I've seen in my whole life," she said, finally smiling, and her eyes lighting up at the sight of the movie bin.

"Yay! Which one should we watch? We have this room on the third floor that's like a mini movie theater just for us, we can watch it in there. How do you feel about hot chocolate and popcorn?" Though Ever After isn't the coldest in February, hot chocolate always cheers me up when I'm sad, even in the summer.

"I love hot chocolate and popcorn!" Annie replied happily. We ended up agreeing to watch Camp Rock, though I'd seen it a million times. Gotta love the Hocus Brothers and Demi Thronevato.

"Okay. Let's go to the kitchen," I said, picking the DVD case out of the bin and pulling a few fuzzy blankets off one of the shelves in my closet.

At the kitchen, we found popcorn and hot chocolate mix in the pantry. I'm not the tallest sword in the collection, so I needed to stand on a stool to reach the mugs in the top shelf in the cabinet. Luckily I did not fall and die... I did almost fall and Annie cracked up.

Next I filled up the mugs with water, microwaved it so it was hot, poured in the cocoa mix and retrieved spoons for Annie and I to mix up the powdery mix and water.

I collected everything we'd need, then turned to Annie. "To the movie room!"