Wedding In Whimsy (eBook)

Clarissa J. Markiewicz (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-0287-5 (ISBN)

Infos

The holidays have come again to the quaint town of Whimsy, New York, where the Spirit of Whimsy grants your deepest wish. This year, Roma Sky, Kyla Silberman, and Wyatt Thomas are going to need her help. The bride-to-be: After a long wait, Roma has finally found her soulmate and gets to plan her dream wedding. When a new entity in town threatens to ruin her special day, though, Roma finds out more than just her wedding is at stake. The maid of honor: Kyla thinks the Spirit of Whimsy is a silly fairy tale, but will a devout believer-who happens to be gorgeous-change her mind? The half brother of the bride: Wyatt is balancing a difficult diagnosis, a baby on the way, and his loveable but wild Italian greyhound. He's got the chaos under control . . . or so he thinks. You're invited to A Wedding In Whimsy, provided the Spirit of Whimsy can help pull it off before that holiday magic fades away.

Clarissa J. Markiewicz is a novelist who hails from Western New York. Her writing has appeared in U.S. News & World Report, The Buffalo News, and Art Times, and has been commended by Scholastic and Rolling Stone. She is the author of The Paramour Pawn (a mystery for gamers) and the heartwarming Christmas In Whimsy, which was awarded the 5-star Seal by Readers' Favorite.

Textauszug

Roma Sky’s waist-length brown hair curtained around her as she trained her eyes to the floor, books clutched to her chest, scurrying out of eleventh-grade history. Final announcements sputtered over the PA just after the bell rang, but they were lost under shouts and laughter, sneakers squeaking on scuffed linoleum, and lockers clanging shut. Roma barely heard the staticky reminders about the concert band’s performance at the Holly Hills tree lighting tomorrow or Science Olympiad meets continuing through the holiday, as the whole of Whimsy-Frontier Prep in little Whimsy, New York, pounded down the stairs and hallways, ready for their winter vacation.

With her head tucked down, eyes peeking up just long enough to gauge whether she was about to ram head-first into another student or teacher or, worst of all, an open locker door—there was precedent—Roma strode toward her own locker, ready to grab her gym bag and coat and the apple she hadn’t eaten at lunch, and get out with the crowds. There was safety in numbers. If she could just make it unnoticed to her mom’s station wagon in the student parking lot, she might not have to talk with anyone, let alone Gary Glace.

For a shy girl like Roma, eye contact was tough. Answering questions in class or solving a problem on the board led to hammering heart palpitations. But Gary Glace, fellow junior, had made everything worse over the past two excruciating weeks. Somehow, Roma had landed smack in his spotlight, the one that, every month or so, he turned on a new introverted and unsuspecting classmate. If “belittling and harassment” or “how to needle at a kid’s most sensitive spot” were required subjects in school, Gary would have an even higher GPA than he already did.

Over the past two weeks, he had lied through his straight, gleaming grin to all his friends with stories about Roma stalking him. For one story he’d even ripped off Fatal Attraction, which had come out in theatres a few months ago, and his closest circle had dubbed her the oh-so-clever “bunny killer.” Gary was just about the last boy Roma would ever be attracted to, and she guessed she was pretty enough where she should have more confidence in herself—tall, with doe eyes of soft brown, high cheekbones, and a slender yet still-developing figure. But her affections for other boys and dating in general freaked her out more than answering questions or making eye contact. And that was what Gary’s spotlight had found.

When Roma reached her locker, she forced herself to slow down a little while turning the combination lock so she wouldn’t mess up the sequence and have to start all over again. She tried the latch, dreading for a second that it might not give, but with a satisfying clank it pulled up and the door swung open.

Just as she snatched her nylon gym bag from the top shelf, a maelstrom thundered down the hall toward her; Roma didn’t so much see it as feel and hear its approach bumping students out of the way and leaving dropped books and fluttered papers in its path. She tucked her head lower to avoid whatever it was, her shoulders tensing as she feared this was Gary coming to deliver her one big Christmas present of torture.

“Roma!” she heard instead, her best friend’s triumphant voice singing above the babel. Kyla Silberman, four months younger than Roma yet years older in looks and confidence, had that wild look in her eyes again as she flew up the hallway. Her rebellious smile flashed, and her blond curls, shoved fashionably over to one side of her head and held in place by a plastic seashell clip and Aqua Net, bounced over her shoulders. She’d come back inside from the direction of the student parking lot, and her backpack and coat were missing. “Roma!”

“Oh God,” Roma muttered to herself, snorting out a laugh and, at the same time, groaning. Speaking at a high decibel was uncharacteristic for Roma, but Kyla had a way of bringing out whatever uproar existed in her, and so she yelled out, “What did you do?”

Kyla stopped herself by running half into Roma and half into the locker. “We have to go,” she said, chomping gum, tugging Roma’s sleeve and giggling uncontrollably. She was over half a foot shorter than Roma, and the look in her upturned eyes had tumbled into a sort of hysterical, joyful terror. “We have to go now.”

Roma had learned not to ask questions when Kyla had that look.

She shoved her gym bag at Kyla and shoved the apple into her bookbag, grabbed her coat, slammed the locker, and spun the dial. Kyla threw the gym bag’s strap over a shoulder, and Roma took off behind her best friend, looking in her black sweater and jeans like a long shadow of Kyla’s neon pink sweatshirt and lime green leggings.

“Where?” shouted Roma, still following but wanting to be prepared for any change in direction.

“Car,” shouted Kyla.

They pounded down the hall, dodging backpacks and pompoms and instrument cases and students barking at them.

“Hey!”

“Watch it!”

“Sorry,” Roma mumbled over her shoulder as she ricocheted off a kid in a rainbow-striped puffy jacket. Her bookbag bounced against her back in rhythm with her gait, and she hiked up her felt winter coat clutched in her hand and pressed against her side.

“Silberman!”

The booming voice from all the way at the opposite end of the hall, behind them, speared through Roma’s spine. She didn’t look back, nor did Kyla, though Roma knew what they’d see: Gary Glace, his full, feathery mullet without a hair out of place, but his usual spurious smile dropped. He’d have four or five cronies flanking him. A second later, she heard Gary and his boys in pursuit, galloping through the same crowd Kyla and Roma had just disrupted. With a crash and a shout, a commotion forced Roma finally to glance behind her; one of Gary’s friends was laid out on his stomach, evidently having tripped. Gary turned to look at his fallen comrade but kept running, and when he faced forward again, he caught Roma’s eye. He snarled and pointed a furious finger at her. The gesture was supposed to be tough, it was supposed to be scary, and yes, Roma was scared. But then she thought, what was he planning to do, point them to death? A laugh escaped her, even as she kept sprinting.

Kyla reached her hand back to Roma, who took it, and they whipped around the corner, narrowly missing the basketball team’s candy cane fundraiser table.

“Daryl,” Kyla called to one of the players manning the table, “we got incoming. Gary Glace.”

“Yup yup,” he told her, nodding her onward. “We got you.”

“Awesome. Put me down for, like, twenty candy canes.” She kissed her fingers and tossed him a wave.

Classroom doors, which had been decorated for the annual Door Wrapping Contest the higher grades held, were a blur of colored gift paper and bows and garland glittering under the hall’s fluorescent tubes. The smell of popcorn balls from today’s home ec classes followed the girls as they neared the stairwell at the end of the hall, and then behind them, Roma heard the cheep and whimper of halted rubber soles running into a wall of basketball players. The girls slammed through the glass doors to the stairwell just as a teacher arrived at the fundraising table and blared like a siren at the two groups of boys who’d already begun talking trash to each other.

Roma and Kyla took the stairs two at a time, thudding up broad wooden steps still in place from half a century ago, and then they banged out one of the similarly aged wooden doors. All warmth and chaos and popcorn were instantly cut off when they got outside. There were fewer people milling around out here. No one wanted to linger under a sky the same pasty gray as whatever was ladled over today’s hot lunch. Upstate New York’s late December socked Roma and Kyla in the gut, a frigid wind stealing their breath a moment, but they kept moving, careful to avoid patches of ice on the blacktop.

“Are you gonna tell me what—” Roma started as they crossed the loading zone and hurried into the student lot.

“Gary Glace had it coming,” Kyla said, not slowing in her beeline to Roma’s mother’s car. She held her curls as the wind tried to blow them into her face. They cut over a row, passing between an Omni and a rusty old Monza. “I mean,” she continued, “he gets all these A’s and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m just so smart,’ but he’s not. He’s a poser whose folks do his homework for him and who think that every time he sneezes flags should fly at half-staff.” She faced Roma, her brown eyes big under purple eyeshadow and deeply lined lids, standing out against her pale skin. “And besides all that, even before he started with you, he was on my radar for picking on everyone. But then he did start with you. And so he had to die.”

Bits of loose asphalt ground under their feet as they came to a stop behind Roma’s mom’s used AMC Eagle Wagon. Her mom had gotten it this past spring, after she and Roma’s dad had divorced—an amicable split when the two had analyzed their problems and then arrived at the most sensible conclusion, though neither had understood Roma’s tears or yelling on the subject. These days, each morning on the way to school, Roma dropped her mom off at work, then...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.11.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-0287-5 / 9798317802875