Y4-+Alyssa+B.

__Alyssa's Page__ My name is Alyssa. I am ten years old. I have lived in Georgia my whole life. I have a twin sister and a dog named Snickers. I love reading and writing stories. I write most of my stories from the main character's point of view, because I think it makes it more, how should I put it? Authentic. My favorite subject is science, and I particularly love meteorology and astronomy. When I grow up, I have dreams of becoming an astronaut and a part-time writer.

She had never had a home. She had never had a family. She had never had a place where she felt loved, where she could walk right in uninvited, where her sleep could be peaceful and her dreams sweet, where even on the coldest night, her heart could be warm. Never a person she knew she could trust, never a warm smile to greet her in the mornings. Never a place to belong. And yet somehow she had never lost hope. She had kept holding on, hoping and dreaming, wishing and praying, making the most of any joy that chanced to come her way. The orphan's secret wish was that she was like a bird; that she could just spread her wings and fly away, far from the Mission in which she had spent her life, away from her old life of sorrow and loss and loneliness, and just keeping flying, with nothing but herself and the rapture in her heart, fly until she reached a better place, a real home;a real family. The orphan, called Hannah, had, through all the hardships her life brought forth, kept believing in that wish with all of her courageous heart. She had just kept on believing, and by believing, she made that wish come true. Hannah stared at her plate. The food was like cardboard, just as stiff and bland and colorless. She hated it, and today she just couldn't bring herself to choke it down. //Let me starve,// she thought, //But I'm not going to eat it, not for the world.// And so instead of eating, Hannah did what she did best. She thought. Hannah liked to think; she always had. Not about things other kids thought about, like sports games, and new toys, and pets, but rather about the one thing other kids at the Mission thought about the least. Books. She loved books; had loved them since the first book she had ever read, //Pinocchio.// A few years later she had read //The Secret Garden//, her first novel. That was when she was six years old. She was nine now, and had read five other novels since then. Of course, if she could work her will, she would read all the time, but she rarely had a chance to get her hands on a book, so she read the books she did have over and over again, and by the time she turned nine, she knew even the longest ones by heart. The lack of books was not, however, completely a bad thing, for it inspired something else in the girl that would play a more important role in her life than she could have imagined. Writing. She hadn't always liked to write stories. It wasn't until she had read all of her books countless times that she realized how important writing was, and what an honor it was to be a writer. Thus, she decided that if she ran out of books to read, she would write her own. The bell rang, announcing the end of supper and jerking Hannah out of her thoughts. She took her tray, still untouched,to the counter and fell into line with the other kids. As they all scattered to enjoy their free time, which they only had in the evening after classes and chores, she hurried to the room she shared with two other girls on the second floor of the Mission, and sat down at her little desk to write by the dim evening light coming through the window. Later, when Hannah had written almost two pages, she moved on to reading //Anne of Green Gables//, which, next to //George And the Giant Peach//, was her favorite story. She liked it because the girl in the story reminded her so much of herself. She had been an orphan all her life, or most of it at least, and she found a loving home. Anne from the story was from Canada, and Hannah was American, but that didn't matter.It was then that Hannah's "roommate," Carson, burst in. "Will you come and play ball with us in the garden, Hannah?" Without looking up from her book, Hannah replied, "No thank you. I'm reading." "Reading?" Carson came over to her desk, looked at the book, and made a face. "Books are dumb. Why do you like to read anyway?" Hannah looked up, but she did not know what to say. Why //did// she love books? And how was she to explain it to someone who would no sooner read a book than eat the Mission's cardboard-food? Carson looked at her expectantly. At last she answered, "What is there not to like? Books are wonderful. And think of all the knowledge one gains from them! They are windows to the world! They are like magic." Hannah paused. "Magic with a cover and a spine." The Mission was run like a boarding school, so they had classes in the mission rather than going to public school. Hannah had always excelled in reading and writing classes. Right now it was writing and English class, and they were learning how to identify the parts of a sentence, which, of course, Hannah already knew. After all, how can one write a story if one cannot write a proper sentence? The Mission's writing teacher, Ms. Gandell, wrote a sentence on the blackboard: //Amanda had long, dark hair.// " Can anyone tell me what the predicate in this sentence is? What about you, Carson?" Carson, who was not very fond of learning and, Hannah could tell, had been paying no attention lately, was silent. She stared at Ms. Gandell. "Could you repeat the question?" She looked at Hannah, as if for a hint, but Hannah only gave an almost imperceptible wag of her head. Carson was her friend, but that did not mean that Hannah would let her cheat off of her. Ms. Gandell repeated the question. After a long silence, the teacher frowned and said, "If you don't know the answer, please say so. We don't have all day." So Carson told the truth. As they were leaving class, books in hand, Hannah passed Carson in the hall. "You could have given me a hint," Carson growled."I know you saw me. I thought you were my friend." She scowled and stomped off. She must have slept in another room that night, because she didn't return when it was time for bed. That night Hannah had a terrible dream. It was;had always been, a recurring dream. It was about her parents. In the beginning she was in a beautiful dining room with walls painted soft green, sitting at a long wooden table with some other people, a man and a woman. The man and the woman were tall and thin with deep blue eyes like Hannah's. Then she said something to the woman,and they all laughed, and they were happy, and they ate delicious food. Then suddenly the soft green walls turned white and the dining table disappeared and she found herself in a white room, with the man beside her and the woman on a bed and some other people she did not recognize standing around the woman, and then suddenly the woman disappeared and Hannah was in total blackness, and she could not see anything, and the man was gone, and she was bewildered and scared and didn't know what to do, so she just stood up and ran, but the blackness just got blacker around her, but she kept running and running and running and running..... Hannah woke with a start. She was shaking uncontrollably and half the blanket was hanging over the side of the bed. She looked around. The other girls were still sleeping. Good. She crept silently to the window and peeked out. The light outside was a dim grayish color. Soon it would be dawn. Hannah shook her head to clear her mind of all the ominous thoughts the dream had sent roaring through her mind, and lay back down. Once or twice she skimmed just beneath the surface of sleep's deep waters, but could never sink to the bottom. Upon realizing that her efforts were hopeless, she dressed quietly and tiptoed to her desk, where she wrote until the sweet silence of early morning was broken by the sound of breakfast being prepared in the kitchen on the downstairs floor of the Mission. There were two visitors that morning at the Mission. They were a tall lady with wild brown hair and a tall man with a squarish head and exaggerated eyebrows. Both wore a friendly smile. The children at the mission were used to such visitors. They came from time to time, they looked around, they talked with Mrs. and Mr. Pik, who ran the mission, and on occasion might talk to one of the kids. They usually did not return again and most of the time, nothing ever came of them and the children's talk of them dwindled and the Piks forgot them. But this time, they stayed through breakfast, whispering things to one another on occasion, and stayed through all of the morning classes. Everyone, even Mr. and Mrs. Piks expected them to leave by then, but they didn't. They stayed through lunch and afternoon classes, they stayed and stayed, they stayed at supper and followed the kids out to the garden for evening free time, and watched them play ball and run and hide, but they never said anything aloud, and they kept their distance from the children. Then finally as the kids were being rounded up into line and then scattered to their separate rooms for bed, the couple said a polite goodbye to Mrs. Pik and drove off in a little black car. Unbeknownst to Hannah and the other children, however, was that the Piks did //not// forget them, and they //did// come back, and they came back for many days after that. If you had been there when the couple talked to Mr. and Mrs. Pik, you would have seen a scene something like this: You see the tall lady and her husband talk to Mrs. Pik. Mrs. Pik nods and leads them upstairs to the room Hannah shares with Carson and the other girl; shows them Hannah's desk. The tall lady sees the stories piled on the desk and reads a little. She thinks the writing is beautiful, and you know that because she smiles broadly and says so, as does the square-faced man who was reading over her shoulder. So the lady asks if the child might mind if she looked at some of the other papers, and Mrs. Pik says no, she thinks it would be fine. So the lady opens the desk drawer and looks around, and reads some of the writing. Then she happens to pick up a folded piece of paper and opens it up, and reads it, well, most of it, but she stops halfway through. She clearly doesn't know what to think, because there it was, Hannah's secret wish, on the paper in her hands, and she thinks it is beautiful, and this is all the couple needs to decide that it was meant to be. They tell Mr. and Mrs. Pik, "We want the girl." And so Hannah's wish came true. Two days later the couple came back. This time Mr. and Mrs. Pik were standing at the door, with red-faced Hannah beside them, overcome with joy. In just minutes, Hannah had said goodbye to all the girls, including Carson, who had forgotten her anger to happiness for her friend, and to the Pik couple. As she stepped into the little black car, Hannah never gave a backward glance. She didn't have wings, she could not fly, but she was indeed leaving her old life behind and beginning a new one, at a better place with a real home and a real family, and now she really did belong, and her heart //was// filled with rapture, and she had kept on believing, and at last, at long, long last, her wish had come true.
 * __Prologue__**