Autumn loved to defy stereotypes.
You could say she did it for fun. You could say she did it just to prove the others wrong. Or you could say it was just how she was. In that case, the correct answer would be all of the above.
Autumn wasn't extraordinary. That's not why I'm writing about her.
September 25th, 2008
Autumn was 8 when she discovered that books could help her escape. I watched as she cried all those times, trying to console her. Those innocent auburn eyes boring into mine, I couldn't bear it.
So I gave her a book.
It was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I handed it to her. I honestly didn't know what to expect. An 8 year old, trying to escape from her reality by reading, of all things, a book about wizards who attended a special school for learning how to fly broomsticks.
I hadn't fully read the book myself, okay?
The first thing that lit up were her eyes. Then her face.
I haven't seen that expression on her face since all of the books disappeared. And I honestly don't know if I'll ever see it again.
October 13th, 2015
AUTUMN'S POV
I just barely managed to fit all my books in my bag. "I really am a nerd." I muttered. "And now I'm talking to myself. That makes me an abnormal nerd too." I sighed. My brother always said I beat myself up more than anybody at school ever could. It was probably true, but I liked to think of it as simply beating them to the insults.
The insults never actually came.
I was definitely confused. I was a fangirl, a geek, I wasn't even smart, and my room was still filled with stuff from when I was 8.
What was wrong with society? In nearly all the books I've ever read, girls like that get picked on. Hermione even got picked on by Harry and Ron and first, and they turned out to be her best friends! For gods sake, couldn't life be more like a book?
"Get in! Are you waiting for me to come and fricking grab a ladder and carry you out the window?" That... Was my brother. He refrained from using curse words around me (I hate them, and I don't see the use of them.), but I knew that around his friends, he spit out curse words as fast as a tennis machine spewed out tennis balls.
"Coming!" I grabbed my grandma's watch and careened down the stairs as fast as my legs could carry me. I swung open the front door and hopped into the front seat of our old convertible.
Let me paint you a portrait:
There's a girl and a boy in a convertible cruising at easily 70 miles per hour. The girl, definitely taller than the boy. Long blonde hair that got in her face and waved in the wind like a banner. The boy driving, jet black hair and glasses over his coffee brown eyes. If you didn't know any better, you would have thought that they were on a date. That is, until you noticed the similarity in the round shape of their faces, and the shared shape of their noses.
That was me and August.
Yes, everyone in our family is named after a month or season.
Yes, that's not normal.
But to be perfectly honest with you, I don't even know what normal is anymore.
Or if it even exists.
