For Your Heart (Hill Dweller Retellings) (42 page)

    
She bites a lip.  “Shall I read it aloud?”

    
My hands come up and I snatch the paper from her and scream, “No!” 

    
I crumple the page between both my hands, somehow hoping brute strength alone can scrub the ink off of the sheet.  I can’t read it, I won’t.  I’ll never look and then whatever she has declared won’t be true.

    
She lowers her hands and sighs as she smiles.  “No matter if you read it.  The deal was made and words were written.  The child has a name and a purpose.  There is no other path for him.”

    
Dread fills me.  “Why?”  I whisper, there’s anger and resignation in my voice.

    
She stands and stretches, the sun bouncing off of her body like mirrors.  She looks down at me and repeats the same words as the Hunter did six months ago.  “It’s only after the fact that we see what our sacrifices have done.”

    
As dread overcomes me and tears prickle my eyes, she walks away.  I shove the little paper into my glove, refusing to see the words.  I’ll never look. I don’t want to know what terrible thing she has written for my baby.

    
Moments later, Dad pulls the car around the building and Tamrin gets out.  I’m too distressed to answer him when he asks what’s wrong.  I tell him I don’t feel well and want to go home.

***

Tamrin

    
Jeanette cried herself to sleep.  I worried she regretted marrying me, but she swore it wasn’t that.  She crawled into my lap and told me she loved me and loved our child.  The whole time crying and crying.  I assume it must be hormones.

    
I pick up the dress she abandoned in a heap on the floor.  She looked so beautiful wearing it.  My bride, my wife.  The thought of having her with me will thrill me forever.  The thought of making a life between us is so wondrous I can’t even grasp it.  

    
Smiling to myself, I twine the folds of lace and silk around my hands then pick up her gloves.  A small ball of paper falls to the floor.  It’s rumpled as though having been handled all day.

    
Neko-Neko trots over and bats at it.  I push him away and pick it up.  Puzzled, I ease the delicate paper apart.  Underneath the wrinkled balling, it is folded into quarters.  I open it and read the tightly written words within.

    
Micah

    
A Most Blessed Child –  a Reward for Purest Love and Unyielding Faith

Weird.  I wrinkle it back up and toss it to Neko.  He promptly gets to ripping it to shreds.  I smile to myself.  Micah, I like that.  It would make a good name.  I’ll have to suggest it to Jeanette when she wakes. 

THE END.

Now, turn the page.

You’ve just finished FOR YOUR HEART.  Whether you enjoyed it or not, you’re in one of two camps of people:  those who read it and felt something wasn’t quite right and those who read it and didn’t notice anything at all.

What you either did or didn’t notice is that FOR YOUR HEART is an issues book wrapped up in a shiny popular fiction wrapper, yet many issues remain undealt with.

Maybe you Camp Two people are mad at me for ruining it for you and I do apologize.  I realize we all run to fiction for a reason.  We want to escape from the harsh realities of the world around us.  But, whether we like it or not, those things we run from and ignore are reality.  Ignoring them isn’t going to fix anything.  Also, let’s not forget that the original fantasy stories – fairy tales like this very retelling is based off of – were cautionary tales, stories about all the bad that could happen even when living in a fantasy.

There are a lot of issues in this book: religion, sex, pregnancy, consent, rape, etc.  Some are dealt with more than others.  I purposely didn’t point out or deal with others.  I wrote the characters in this book to be like some real people, like some real teens – blind to reality, living in a fantasy.

I wanted terrible things to happen to my characters without them even realizing it.  I wanted them to come up with excuses for themselves and the bad things that others do to them.  I wanted them to blame themselves and feel peer pressure.  I wanted them to want to be loved.  I wanted them to judge each other by the cover.

I wanted them to be like we are: Real people, not fantasy people.

Some readers saw the terrible things, some didn’t.  Maybe everyone should have.  Maybe that’s a problem we should examine further.  We humans have an amazing ability to – for various reasons – ignore what’s wrong, thus allowing it to go on unchecked.

Many of my readers wanted to know why I was marketing a book with undealt with issues to teen readers.  The answer is simple: I want you, readers and parents alike, to be the ones to point out what’s wrong in the novel.  I want you to understand what things like consent and rape culture and victim blaming are so that when you see it in reality -- when it happens to you or someone you know -- you know it for what it is and can do something about it.  I want readers to think about the consequences of what they do and who they do it with.  I want readers to walk in someone else’s shoes before calling them names.  I want to create dialogue.

In light of that, I’ve created DIALOGUES FOR YOUR HEART, a free discussion and information guide for parents and teens which is available through my website: www.ALDavroe.com.  I hope that you’ll all take a look at it and that maybe it will help someone somewhere.

Thank you for reading!

-A.L. Davroe