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Here Comes Blizzard! | Shook Chapter 1 Part 2
After the encounter with Blizzard, Dyan unfortnetly didin't have the dog toy, and she's not too happy with her best friend...
Dyan stomped angrily ahead of Kayla on the walk home from school. She turned once to see Kayla looking at her with a sad expression.
“Dyan, I’m really sorry-”
“I don’t wanna hear it!” Dyan yelled. Of course after the trouble was over, Kayla wanted to apologize and forget everything that happened. Dyan wasn’t even going to listen to the whole apology act.
Kayla continued. “It’s just that Blizzard was so big and-”
“You locked the door when that huge dog was hurling at me and furthermore, had the nerve to watch from the curtain to see what would happen to me! Just leave me alone, Kayla. Clearly you have better friends to hang out with.” Dyan said angrily.
“But it wasn’t me who locked the door, it was Cecil-”
“I just said I don’t wanna hear it!”
Kayla’s facial expression then changed from sorry to angry, her eyebrows practically sitting on top of her eyes. “Well maybe I do have better friends to hang out with! Ones that are not super big grudge-holders like you!”
Kayla then turned and stomped back up the road.
Dyan turned to watch Kayla go, and sighed. She was very mad at her best friend, but being all alone made her feel worse, especially since she had to find the new foster home she’d be living in. Her previous foster parent announced she was moving out of state and couldn’t take care of the foster children she had any longer, making them all have to split up and change foster homes. Whatever. Not like Dyan had grown close to her or the other children anyway…at least not much.
Most of the foster kids at Dyan’s previous home had to fit all their belongings in one garbage bag, as that’s all that was given to them to pack. But luckily, Dyan had her bookbag. Sure, its once shiny designs had long yellowed from six years of use, and her younger self had chewed off one of the backpack strap strings, but Dyan loved her back pack. It was big enough to hold everything she owned, and she’d take it over a plastic trash bag anyday.
She unzipped her bookbag and pulled out her notebook, turning it to a certain page. Isolated from all her stories and doodles, was a name and an address.
“Miss Moleti. House number 60. Clanger Road.” Dyan said to herself. She looked up at the green street sign that stood next to her on the sidewalk. It read Clanger Road. This was the place Dyan would call home. For now.
She walked until she saw a house with a plastic number 60 glued to the pedestal at the door. It was a one-story long brown house with gray shutters. The wood was chipped in some places, and the grass was uneven and past Dyan’s ankles, but she was sure this was the place.
She heard an electric whine coming from inside the house.
Miss Moleti must be vacuuming, Dyan thought to herself. She knocked on the door. When no answer came within 5 minutes, Dyan went to her notebook again.
“The key is in the flowerbed,” Dyan read to herself. She turned to the wooden flower bed beside the front door, and leaned down and found the key in between some drooping pink flowers.
Once she was inside, she heard the whine even louder than before, coming from a closed door in the hall.
Dyan was tempted to open the door to see what that sound was, but then she remembered what Miss Moleti had told her upon their first meeting. “If the door isn’t already open, don’t go in the room.” Miss Moleti had given her an evil stare when she’d said this, and Dyan didn’t want to know what would happen if she disobeyed her.
Dyan then skipped past the barely furnished living room to the kitchen, where she set her notebook on the table and went to the fridge for a snack.
On the front of the fridge was a note. Dyan leaned down and read it.
“I am at work from 9:00 to 5:00. Here are the rules. Don’t break anything, no staying out past 7:00 and don’t call me unless it’s an ABSOLUTE emergency.” Dyan huffed. “Rules, rules, rules!”
It looked like Miss Moleti wasn’t at home. After all, it was only 4:00. Inside the fridge was nothing but a glowing white space of shelves and containers. There was, however, one huge box of coconut-stuffed dates sitting on the top shelf. Dyan fought the urge to gag. She then managed to find only two other things: a bunch of apples, and a thin carton of almond milk. She grabbed an apple, poured herself some almond milk and had a seat at the table.
Dyan flipped to the drawing of Spirit. In a speech bubble next to her mouth, it read “Anything can be an adventure! You just have to have the guts to go through with it!”
Dyan sighed. “Oh, Spirit. If only I could think of an interesting story for you.”
Dyan shut her notebook once again. In this mood, no good writing was going to come out of her. Time for homework, she guessed.
In a few moments she was staring at a black and white page asking her to convert fractions into decimals, and vice versa.
As Dyan worked, she began to smell a barbeque. Weirdly, there was no sweet smell of cooking meat, just the burning charcoal smell.
Dyan shrugged it off. The smoke smell got more pungent. Dyan looked up from her homework. She began to sweat. Had the house gotten hotter? And why was it so hard to breathe?
Dyan looked up to see a bunch of gray smoke enter the room.
A chill washed over her, and her heart began to race. A loud, high-pitched noise made Dyan startle out of her seat.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
It was the smoke detector. A red light flashed on it every few seconds.
“Oh no, a fire! What do I do!?” Dyan yelled out loud. She got up from her chair and ran to the front door. The whole front hallway of the house had become a mess of dark orange flames and cloudy gray smoke. The fire cackled as if it enjoyed burning everything in its path to black ash.
Dyan screamed. She ran back to the kitchen, where the foggy haze was getting worse. The smoke tickled her throat and made her go into a fit of coughs.
Dyan, calm down, something in the back of Dyan’s mind seemed to say. Even though she was still mad at Kayla, she remembered the tip she’d told her.
When things get tough, go slow.
There was a back door right beside the kitchen table. Dyan ran back to the kitchen, snatched her notebook and bookbag, and ran out the back door.
Find out what happens next in the next part!
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