Kingdom Keepers: Once Upon a Dream

Chapter 7

A/N: Hello everyone I'm back! Sorry for the lapse in posting, I had a rough weekend. I'm going to try and get another chunk of the story up now! As for this chapter, major angst warning ahead, but the dynamics were probably the most fun to play with out of any in the entire story, so I hope you enjoy!

˜

For almost all of her twenty years, Charlene Turner's life seemed to have been plucked straight from a movie. She'd grown up with a single Mom, who she considered her best friend, and she fit every stereotype of the girl who had it all: tall, fit, blonde, charismatic; she didn't live through a single grade without being the most popular girl in school. In Elementary school she was friends with practically everyone, and when she hit middle and high school, she became friends with the other most popular girls in school, started going by Charlie, and was head cheerleader by her sophomore year. Her life was, for all those who looked onto it, entirely charmed.

Things had changed a bit since she'd gone to college. At first, everything went as she expected it to go. She entered USC as a Physical Education major with a place on the cheerleading squad and a scholarship for it. She made fast friends with most of the people in her dorm building, went to parties every weekend and drank herself silly. She lived the college life out of the movies that had always been promised to her.

Things changed when she came home for her first Winter break: her friends from high school had all but forgotten her, and she'd spent most of the vacation at home making crafts and watching Gilmore Girls with her Mom. Taking a break from the glitz and glamour and partying, and being left behind by the people she'd spent her entire adolescence with had forced her to slow down and think, think about what she really had, and the things she'd done and said in high-school. It bothered her so much that she forced herself not to think about it too much.

After that break, she'd slowed down a bit. She spent more time studying or getting coffee with her teammates than partying when she returned to school. She called her Mom more often, took time for herself, and in general, tried to pay better attention to how she behaved and treated people. She spent her summers coaching a child's cheerleading squad at the local rec center, and she loved every minute of it. She spent most of her free time with her mother, some of it with coworkers, some of it on the occasional Tinder-date. Things were different, and change was definitely hard, but, for the most part, things were still good; life was good.

With life being as good as it was, the last thing she had expected when she came out of work yesterday was to meet a girl who told her that she was a character from a book series. She expected even less to find herself following through on the girl's theories and meeting a group of random strangers in Disney World, and even less to find out that one of those strangers was a boy who she went to high-school with. But even after all of that, what had been the least expected thing of all, was that she'd found herself deciding to try and reconnect with that boy.

She had no intentions of following through on Casey's plans. She'd chalked it up as a crazy, random, experience, and decided to leave it to be a story she told when she was trying to make a cute guy laugh at a wedding. That didn't mean, however, that she couldn't reap some benefits from a crazy story. That lead her to where she was now.

She took a deep breath as she looked up at the sign above the store in front of her: Crazy Glaze. How she remembered how to get here, or that Terry Maybeck's Aunt owned the shop, she had no idea-she hadn't been there since the ninth grade-but she did, and so here she was. She started to turn back for a moment, because she really had no idea why she was there, but then, just like when she decided to come here in the first place, she surged forward and opened the door, almost like she was guided by a force outside of herself.