The First 350 Words

Chapter One:

Princess Catherine

I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that guy in the Hawaiian shirt was really an ogre.

Right outside the dusty window, he gnawed on a big, greasy turkey leg and leaned against the sign that advertised our flower shop. He had long hairy arms and a hook nose and one big eyebrow all the way across his forehead.

I sat completely still while my heart thudded. Ogres were the ones that ate children, right?

Except that nobody walking around seemed to notice. Magic dust or something sparkled all around him, but everyone else strolled by like he was just some random guy hanging out on the boardwalk with pineapples on his shirt. I didn’t know what was more terrifying, the fact that I was looking at a real, live ogre or the fact that I was the only one seeing the freaking ogre. Had the meatball completely rolled off my spaghetti? I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut … then looked again.

The guy in the Hawaiian shirt was just a guy. No sparkles or anything.

I blew my breath out. Get a grip, Cat. Rose warned you not to read those fairy tales right before bed. But where else could I read them? My mom didn’t approve of “those kinds” of stories, so I had to sneak them at my best friend Rose’s house during sleepovers.

I sighed and looked down at the school report on the workbench in front of me. The only thing I’d written so far was, “Catherine Brökkenwier, age 12.” I was supposed to be writing my history paper on Warwick Castle in England. That’s why I was stuck by myself in the back room of our shop, surrounded by Mom’s gardening tools and the smell of wet dirt. But instead of writing, I’d been pretending I was a princess in my very own castle, with fairy ladies-in-waiting and dungeons filled with goblins. At least Mom couldn’t stop me from dreaming. But who was I fooling? Princesses were supposed to be beautiful and graceful and have rooms full of gold. And less dirt under their fingernails.

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