Tonic of Wildness

CHAPTER 1

Thalia's POV

Thalia - 10 years old

I have to pee, like really bad. It's always like this in the winter season. Whenever; I would be in a deep sleep, it would always get interrupted by my bladder. I shouldn't have drunk so much water before bed.

I sluggishly get out of my warm bed and go to the bathroom. After using the toilet, I head back to my room. As I enter the room, I see that Madds (Madison- my sister) isn't in her bed. My sleep had already been ruined, so I decided to find her so that we both could play something together until we were tired enough to go back to sleep.

I slowly and carefully go down the stairs to search for my sister. If mom knew we were up this late: she would scold us until our ears bled.

Something catches my eye at the entrance window of the house, I go closer to inspect it. Instantly my lips lift in a smile as I see something that I had been wishing for since the start of winter. It was snowing! Snow had already accumulated in our front yard. Excitedly, I went to go search for my sister, who was in the kitchen eating a late-night snack.

"Madison!" I whisper-shout.

She startles at the sound of my voice, dropping the Oreo in her milk and looks at me with a frown before she sees my delighted expression and gets curious about it.

"Why are you smiling? You always have a frown on your face when you wake up in the middle of the night."

"It's snowing outside!" I tell her excitedly.

She abandons her snack, and we both go to the entrance window so she could check for herself if it was snowing. When she sees the snow, she smiles and starts lightly jumping up and down because of the excitement.

"Oh my god! Thalia, you got your wish. It's snowing." She excitedly jumps and hugs me as we both watch the snowfall.

A sudden urge hits me to go outside and play in the snow. When it snowed last year, we were away on a trip and had missed it, so this year I had wished for snow so that I could play in it.

"Let's go outside Madds, I want to play in the snow."

She looks at me incredulously. "Thalia, it's 1 in the morning. We can't go outside at this hour, especially not in this freezing cold weather without telling mom or dad."

"Come on Maddison," I whine. "What if it stops snowing when we wake up in the morning? You know how much I wanted to play in the snow this year, I even wished it for my birthday instead of wishing for a trip to Disneyland, and you know how much I love Disneyland."

"Thalia....."

"Please Madds, I promise we'll come back in 20 minutes. Mom and dad won't even know about it."

"Fine." She agrees reluctantly.

We both grab our coats and boots and quietly go outside from the back door to the backyard. The grass is covered with a thick sheet of snow, it was pretty deep as well since our boots sink in the snow.

Since we lived near the forest, the trees were covered in snow as well. The scenario in front of me was so beautiful and bewitching. The beautiful and richly coloured green trees were now covered with a thick coat of snow on them, and a light fog misted the air. This all reminded me of a scene from the beauty and the beast, where they went outside to have some fun in the snow and had a snowball fight, and Belle fell backwards from the force of the beast's snowball.

"Thalia, let's build a snowman."

"Ok, but then we'll have a snowball fight as well."

We start making a snowman. I fall over twice because of the thick snow. We make the whole snowman: poking two holes in the face of the snowman to make its eyes, though we couldn't find anything to use as its nose.