The True Cinderella Story

Chapter One

It all started because of a cat at a carnival.  My family had taken the day off from our always busy schedule to attend the carnival that was being held about an hours ride from where we lived.  The four of us traveled there – what’s that?  You didn’t know there were four of us?  Well, I’ll forgive your ignorance.  After all, you have been kept in the dark your entire life about my true life’s story, how could you be expected to know anything.  

Ahem.  As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the four us had traveled there in our crude, sturdy cart drawn by the faithful old horse Buttons, so christened by my younger sister Willa.  She, Mother, and Father rode together on the buckboard up front, while I curled up on a blanket in the back and tried my best to draw while bumping along.  For the record, that didn’t work too well.

The array of sights, smells, and sounds that bombarded our simple country senses once we arrived were almost overwhelming.  And so it is not that difficult to understand how easy it was for Willa to get distracted by a tabby cat and dart away after it, and how it took the three of us a minute to notice her disappearance.  A frantic search followed, in which nearly all of the tents were scoured and all the people questioned.

When we finally found her, it was in the center of the carnival, stroking the tabby cat and talking to a pleasant-looking woman with two tall girls standing next to her.  Who was that woman, you ask?  Well, I’ll tell you.  She was to become my future stepmother.  But as I’ve already mentioned, she was very pleasant looking, and actually quite nice.  Amelia, as her name was, was on the plump side, with cinnamon colored hair pulled into a loose bun and kindly brown eyes.

The two girls next to her would someday become my stepsisters.  And honestly, they weren’t all that awful.  We just didn’t have a lot in common.  They were graceful, dignified, and very unclumsy; in short, they were everything I wasn’t, and as a result we never spent that much time together.  Anyway, back to the present.  The two girls, Lilly and Lacey, had immediately fallen in love with Willa and kept cooing over her like she was a little doll.  My parents promptly fell into a conversation with Amelia, and I was left alone.  So, I wandered off and blew up one of the tents. 

Hey, it was an accident!  I didn’t mean to trip and bump into one of the flame-swallowers, making him set the tent holding the fireworks aflame.  But it did.  I had wandered off, looking for something more interesting than the two girls cooing and the adults endless chattering.  My mind wandered, as it so often did, dreaming of things to draw and stories to tell my family around the fire.  And I still say it wasn’t my fault I tripped; someone should have been more careful where they put that rock! 

 Long story short, ka-boom.  My family rushed over, immediately knowing that where trouble was, I was probably at the heart of it.  You see, this wasn’t the first time my clumsiness got me into scrapes.  This was just the biggest scrape I’d gotten into so far.  Mother whisked me and Willa away to the wagon, while Father hung back and apologized to the flame-swallower and everyone who had gotten singed in the explosion, blaming it on the ‘foolishness of youth’.