The Carving in the Tree

Chapter 1

 PROLOGUE

A lone figure ran through the grassy paddock, her silky black hair flying out behind her. The long stalks of grass catching at her slim waist. She pushed past the stems hurriedly, heading towards a tree. The tree stood tall and green in the brown, autumn paddock. It’s low branches allowing the perfect spot for one to conceal oneself. It was a place that took you away from the paddock and prying eyes of the outside world.

The girl with the black hair continued to run, even whilst her body shook with sobs. She reached the tree and placed one hand up on the old bark trunk. With careful fingers she slid her hand over to a symbol carved into the bark; a love heart with the initials W.P and T.O inside it. The girl shuddered in a breath and slowly sat on one of the gnarled roots that protruded from the soil. Her tears left tracks through the grime on her face, and she caught them just as they started to spill down onto her lap. With one hand covering her face and the other pressed into the carving that Tyler Opal had made, the girl sat and stayed till the night enveloped her.

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  CHAPTER 1

12 months earlier

To Tyler there was no one more beautiful than the new girl. Her black hair tumbled down her back in long curls, her eyes were a piercing emerald green and she had all the right curves in the right places. Her name was Willow. Willow Palor. And lucky for Tyler, she had moved into the house next door to him. She had moved to Hershire with her grandmother after her father had died.

Hershire was a pretty depressing place. Tyler had no idea why she and her grandmother would move here. Sure Hershire was big and every resident had a country estate, pretty much, but it was still very dreary and altogether disappointing. The only thing that Tyler wanted to with his life was to get away from here, but in a way he could see what Willow and her grandmother had been trying to do by moving. They were trying to get away. And that might work, but not likely.

Tyler stared as Willow walked down the hall, her books hugged to her chest, her hair falling in waves down across her face. He leaned against his locker and sighed. She really was beautiful… and shy, but Tyler could fix that.

“We got a hopeless romantic over here everybody!”

Tyler turned to Asher, his best friend since he was only just toddling on his meaty baby feet. Tyler rolled his eyes at Asher and Asher raised his eyebrows.

“Ooo, we got some attitude too, do we?” Asher asked of the crowd of uninterested teenagers

Tyler gave Asher a smirk, “You know absolutely no body is listening, don’t you?”

Asher gave him evil smile that said ‘I know something that you don’t’

“That isn’t one-hundred percent true,” He said, “You were listening…” He paused and pointed down the hall, “And so was she” he added.

Tyler whirled around, but only caught a flicker of black hair before it was gone, disappearing into the nearest classroom.

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It wasn’t that Willow was eavesdropping or anything, but she just happened to hear the conversation between the two boys. She was pretty sure one of them was her neighbor. Yes, definitely. The one with the soft brown curls and grey eyes definitely lived next door; she had seen him feeding his chickens and sitting in the middle of one of their paddocks with a pen and paper, doing who knows what.

Although Willow had over heard the boys, she had not seen whom they were talking about. She thought that perhaps they were talking about Eden, the pretty blonde girl in history class with her. Everyone seemed to like Eden. Willow wished everyone could like her, but she wasn’t as pretty as Eden… or as popular.

Willow was more of the reserved, extremely shy kind of person. She was intelligent, but would only show this on her tests as she was too shy to put her hand up in class. She kept her books and locker and room at home tidy and clear. She also liked to keep her nose in a book, all the time. As Willow didn’t have many friends, her books kept her company and she liked to imagine the characters coming to life and interacting with her; becoming her friends or becoming a romantic interest, but eventually, no matter what, she was called out of her fantasy and back into the real world, where she didn’t have any friends.

Willow moved to a desk at the back of her history class, sat, placed all her books down and started to stack them neatly on one side of her desk. She then attempted to slowly melt back into her chair, so she would be overlooked for the entire lesson. She glanced at the clock and thought, “Only seventy minutes of this Willow, you can do it”.

She picked up her pen and started to write notes on the French Revolution, but try as she might, her mind kept skipping back to the conversation she had overheard in the hallway, and the boy with the grey eyes…