Hey again everyone! It's time for today's second excerpt and giveaway for YA Excerpt Week here on Mera's YA Book List! Check back everyday for new excerpts, giveaways, and awesomeness!
And they are all still open!
This one is a awesome one!
Not only are you getting an awesome excerpt to read, 3 of you lucky Listers will get a bookmark for Janell Rhiannon's Invisible Wings! One of you Listers will get both a bookmark and a paperback copy of Janell's novel, Invisible Wings!
And the bookmarks are so totally signed! I know right?
Now onward to the magic!
On her fifteenth birthday, Arabella finds out she’s on the path to becoming a full-fledged Virtue angel. When the Voice fills her with a blinding light, her angelic mission is revealed: she was put on Earth to guide and guard teenagers. She hears their darkest thoughts and their secret wishes. She must help them realize their true destinies…and she can time travel to do it. The moment the first star pops into the twilight sky, Arabella shimmers into action on invisible wings. 12 Twilights 12 Destinies 12 Teenagers who will never be the same
This excerpt is actually a sneak peek at Chapter 10 of Invisible Wings!
Chapter 10
The Sweetest Sound Home is a journey that begins with a shooting star. You travel on purpose through swirling diamond dust and cold purple dreams through the atmospheric barrier where you catch fire with life. You are the shooting star of your own life as you fly toward your destination of skin and bones and guts and a home. Sometimes four walls and roof get confused with a home. Home is where the love that nurtures you rises like a song at sunrise. It’s where you learn what being precious feels like in your mother’s eyes. Home is where you learn what being safe feels like in your father’s arms. Home is where love is in the refrigerator next to the milk and cheese. You can take your first steps anywhere. Nalae packed up her clothes in a dirty orange backpack as the sun rose every Monday through Friday. She used a big safety pin to keep her backpack closed. She scooted out of the car looking around to make sure that no one from school was there. She hiked the backpack over her shoulder and walked across the Wal-Mart parking lot and went into the store. She didn’t intend on buying anything. She didn’t have any money. Nalae and her little sister used the Wal-Mart bathroom because they lost their house to the bank three months ago and lived in their car. If she got in the bathroom early enough, no one stared or asked stupid questions. She splashed cold water on her face and washed her hair with hand soap. She hated how the foamy soap made her hair stiff and fuzzy, but it was better than being called grease-head. She used the brown service towels to wash her arms and legs. The last thing she always washed was her feet. She balanced on each leg, one at a time, to get each foot in the sink. She scrubbed the soles as hard as she could, but she could never quite wash the homelessness off of them. So far, no one from Wal-Mart tried to stop Nalae or her sister from using the bathroom. She gratefully wiped down the sink and the mirror and the floor every morning. Today in class, Nalae realized that she forgot to exchange her dirty clothes for her school books when she went back to the car after she left the Wal-Mart bathroom. Her little sister had needed her hair brushed. She had tangles from sleeping with her head smashed into the corner of the door and the back seat. It took longer than Nalae expected to smooth the wild matted mess her sister woke up with. She hurried out of the car to walk the two miles to school. She was only five minutes late to her first class, but the teacher marked her tardy anyway. “Why are you tardy, Nalae?” our teacher asked. “I don’t know. I didn’t get up early enough, I guess.” “You have lunch detention. That’s two tardies in two days.” “OK,” Nalae said out loud. But I heard what she said inside her head. What am I supposed to tell her? That it’s a long walk from the Ford Expedition to school? That I had to get ready in a public bathroom? Nalae’s eyes watered as she sat at her desk with a backpack full of damp dirty clothes and no binder or homework. I could hear her mortified voice repeating, OMG what if someone finds out? I handed her some notebook paper and a pen. “Thanks,” she whispered. Homework and damp clothes were the least of Nalae’s problems. Her stomach grumbled with emptiness. She wrapped her arm across her waist to muffle the sound of her homelessness. She refused to look up at anyone in class, but she did keep looking at the clock on the wall that always ran three minutes slow. OMG, this class takes forever. Stupid clock. The second hand tapped each black dot, one by one, circling around the clock face over and over all morning long in every class until the lunch bell rang her relief. Kids crowded into the cafeteria line. Quite a few kids who she used to know, but who she now mostly ignored. They didn’t know her father lost his job and that she lived in a car in the Wal-Mart parking lot, but they knew her mother died two years ago. They knew that soon after the funeral, Nalae withdrew from polite high school society and went underground. She started dressing in black from head to toe, smudging black kohl around her eyes like an Egyptian princess and dyeing her dark blonde hair jet black. She dropped out of honor choir and never looked back. She punched her seven digit number into the computer at the cash register to get her free lunch. She was so grateful for the soggy sandwich with mix and match white and wheat bread slices stuck together by sticky yellow cheese that she thanked the cafeteria lady with a shy smile she rarely showed to anyone. In a corner booth, she ate not only in silence but in self-imposed exile. She ate the entire sandwich with her fingers ripping one small piece off at a time. It lasted longer that way. Her very best girlfriends, the ones who knew what her mother’s chocolate chip cookies tasted like hot and melting from the oven, didn’t eat with her anymore because they ate at Taco Bell or McDonalds. They wouldn’t be caught dead eating in the cafeteria where the disabled kids and immigrants ate…where she ate. She wasn’t sure if they were even her friends anymore. They all had cell phones and computers, but she didn’t have anything like that anymore. On the inside where it mattered, she felt relieved they ignored her because she didn’t have to lie about her dad losing his job at the insurance company or talk about how the Sherriff came and escorted them from their house. The disabled kids and immigrants never asked her why she was in there with them. They didn’t care. We understand the concept that “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone” but we ignore it mostly. Every day the green grass blades bend and flatten under our feet as we walk from one place to another, with each blade remaining changed even after we are long gone. No one ever thanked the grass for softening their footsteps along the way to gym class. What if a pebble jumped into your shoe? How many steps would you take before you knelt down to remove it? You don’t think about the sacrifice of the grass until the pebble reminded you that your life used to be different. Nalae’s homelessness really began when her mother died, not the first night they slept in the car under the stars. Her mother went to the grocery store one day and never came back. Hours after she had left to buy butter, brown sugar and Hersey’s chocolate chips, her father got a phone call. Nalae remembered how he slumped over the counter and howled. It rattled her that her father’s body shook like an oak tree in a savage storm. She never worried about anything because her father seemed so strong on the outside. She tried to hug him as the tempest of tears ripped his invisible heart out by the root. “Don’t cry, daddy. Don’t cry.” When he could finally speak, Nalae’s father said with a voice as wretched as his sobbing, “A car ran a red light...your mother. She’s gone. They said she didn’t suffer. She’s gone, Nalae. What am I supposed to do?” At the funeral, Nalae didn’t shed a single tear. Pale pink roses draped her mother’s casket, trailing like a floral curtain down the church isle. Her mother used to love pink roses and the hymn Amazing Grace that the choir sang as the pallbearers wheeled the casket to the front of the sanctuary. At the cemetery, Nalae plucked a single pink bud from the casket arrangement and tried to recall the sound of her mother singing the hymn Amazing Grace while she baked chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen, but she couldn’t remember the sound of her mother’s voice at all. When she got home, she put the wilting bud into her jewelry box. Everyone said she looked so strong, but that was only on the outside. On the inside, Nalae shriveled up like a raisin. Have you ever noticed that the things that end up mattering most in life are the things most easily overlooked? Like the sun that spreads warmth across your shoulders or the sleepy smile of a baby while sugarplum-filled dreams danced in her eyes or the way your belly hurt when you laughed so hard the milk came out of your nose or the smile your mother gave you as you rushed out the door. Not until you lost it all would you appreciate any of it. When you have it, you walk right over it, like the green grass. Nalae’s loss colored her world with shades of silent gray and painful black. Her invisible heart broke. It was easy to live in a cramped Ford Expedition; it was hard to live without the voice of her mother singing in the kitchen while she baked chocolate chip cookies. It was easy to balance on one leg at a time and wash her dirty feet; it was hard to think she was forgetting her mother. It was easy to rim her eyes with kohl; it was hard to hold back the tears she couldn’t find. It was easy to forget the house they used to live in; it was unbearable to live every day without her mother and watch her father shrivel into a raisin. Daddy, please don’t cry any more. Please, don’t cry. It’s breaking my heart. Her father’s pain was tearing her invisible heart in half. So she lined her eyes with more kohl. Daddy, I don’t care about the house. Please, stop crying. Nalae’s darkest fear was that her father would die, too, leaving her alone with her little sister. What would I do? What would I do? So she wore black to save her from her fears. 1 I watched as Nalae did her homework in the dimming light of day. The sky began to turn from pale blue to pink until finally the twilight purple began to spread from the edge of the universe. The first star was just about to blink into the first blush of night colors and my human bindings released me. I touched Nalae like a warm fog and her eyes closed with sugarplum dreams. She saw her mother baking chocolate chip cookies while she sang: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me.... I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now, I see. T’was Grace that taught... my heart to fear. And Grace, my fears relieved. How precious did that Grace appear... the hour I first believed. Through many dangers, toils and snares... we have already come. T’was Grace that brought us safe thus far... and Grace will lead us home. “Mama is that you?” Tears blurred Nalae’s sight. Her mother turned around and smiled so brightly, Nalae shielded her eyes, “Yes, it’s me.” “Mama, I miss you so much.” “I’m sorry I had to leave you.” Nalae’s throat tightened and she didn’t recognize her own voice, “I’m so lonely.” “Don’t be lonely my sweet girl.” “I’m afraid because daddy’s so sad.” Her mother wrapped her arms around her weeping daughter and stroked her black hair until it turned blonde again. “My darling girl, I am always with you. I’m in the sunshine that falls across your shoulders. I’m in the stars you look upon. I’m in the love you and daddy and your little sister have for each other. Look for home inside the love Nalae.” 1 T he next day in class when Nalae opened her back pack it was full of pink roses. She looked around the room. “They’re beautiful,” I said. “Where did they come from?” Nalae was confused. “You’re mother.” Nalae’s eyes watered, “How do you know that?” “Weren’t pink roses her favorite?” “Ladies! Quit talking in the back,” our teacher sternly warned, “now!” I shrugged like it was nothing. I felt Nalae’s heart fill with warm remembrances of her mother. It was exactly what she needed. Sometimes, memories can heal us.
That was awesome right! Thanks so much Janell!
Janell Rhiannon has been writing since she was in grade school. In high school, her 9th grade English teacher suggested she consider a career in writing. After a decade in college and a Master's degree in history, she became a part-time college history instructor and eventually settled into teaching high school.Writing never stopped. Stories never stopped. READING fiction never stopped. Now, Janell writes and publishes her works on-line. Invisible Wings is her first YA novel, a compilation of short stories centered on teenage life triumphs and tragedies. Mythology and Fairytales are her favorite things to research and write about. Anything magical and mystical. She now resides in CA and continues teaching freshmen. Visit the author at Facebook @Janell Rhiannon and Invisible Wings. If you want to see what projects are coming this year or find out more about the author, visit Janell Rhiannon's website:www.janellrhiannon.weebly.com Janell Rhiannon @ Facebook Invisible Wings@ Facebook theravenangel@ Twitter janellrhiannon.blogspot.com
Giveaway Prize! 3 winners will recieve one of Rhiannon's signed Invisible Wings bookmarks. 1 winner will recieve a signed bookmark and a paperback copy of Invisible Wings. This giveaway has one mandatory entry: You must be a Mera's YA Book List follower! And why wouldn't you want to be a Lister? Trust me, you'll be adored here! :) Fill out the rafflecopter to win!
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