Novel Jumper

Chapter One

The drawing above is, obviously, of Lilia! The amazing artist, Maren, helps run my side account, @authorsinarms . (The arm tattoos and Adidas shirt were drawn when Maren still didn't know who the girl would be. The art just ended up looking like Lilia and she let me use it in this story!

Yawning, Lilia Well burrowed further under her blankets and prayed to God that it was early enough in the morning to get some more sleep. Balefully, she eyed her alarm clock from across the room.

6:00. Crap.

Lila rolled out of her bed and onto the floor. There, she stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars that had been stuck to her ceiling since second grade and wondered what would happen if she just lay there and refused to move. She supposed her mother might attempt to drag her down the stairs. Or maybe, since it was the day before her birthday, her mother would take mercy on her and leave her be.

These thoughts passed through Lilia's head like flies in honey. She had never been a morning person. Or a night person, for that matter. She was certainly an afternoon person.

But school did not start in the afternoon, it started way too early in the morning. 7:00 to be exact.

Lilia sighed and stood, clutching her head as dizziness at her sudden movement washed over her. She yanked a white sweater and blue skinny jeans out of her closet, pulled them on, and headed into the bathroom.

After she yanked a brush through her snarled hair, Lilia washed her face. The cold water running in rivulets over her cheekbones and off of her slim nose was refreshing. She gripped the edge of the sink and met her own gaze in the mirror. Her eyes were her only feature that she truly liked. They were bright green with little flecks of a lovely hazel color. She got complimented on her eyes more than anything. Which was understandable, really, when one looked at the rest of her features.

Lilia had dark brown hair that was either very straight, very wavy, or an odd mixture of both. Today seemed to be the latter, as it usually was. She pulled it into its usual high ponytail and wiped off her face, stemming the miniature rivers running over her high and strangely prominent cheekbones and slightly freckled cheeks. A small scar rested under her left eye from an unfortunate biking accident when she was younger - really the only remarkable thing about herself besides her eyes.

She poked her nose, which was just a little too upturned, disdainfully and swept out of the bathroom. Feeling much more awake, she hopped down the stairs two at a time and slid into the kitchen.

Her mother was already up and clattering pots and pans around for no apparent reason. Cooking was Mrs. Well's personal form of therapy, and ever since her oldest child, Ryan, had dropped out of college, she seemed to need to do it quite often.

"Your last day of being fifteen!" she trilled when Lilia entered the kitchen. "Cherish the day!"

Lilia thought of the day ahead of her. A positively boring day in school, the highlight of which was a math test, and then an afternoon of homework and an evening of reading while her little sister watched loud television or listened to equally loud music in the background.

"I will," she told her mother, who was just a little too optimistic for Lilia this early in the morning, and crossed the kitchen to the walk-in cabinet.

When Lilia was little and her mother and brother would fight, Lilia took to hiding in the warm walk-in cabinet and even taking her toys and books in there to pass the time. Her mother and Ryan had never gotten along well and had often gotten in fights before they sent him to a boarding school, so Lilia had been a rather tubby child.