“You daughter of a beast! Get back here with my apple!” The old store-woman yelled at me.
I won’t lie. Yes, I had stolen her apple, and yes, now I was running away. My belly hurt, it had been empty for two days now, and I could use a little hydration and energy.
Before you judge me for stealing, you must realise that I have never been ‘given’ anything. Well, except for one thing. My parents gave me life, but abandoned me afterwards. The last time I remember seeing them was when I was two, when my mother said she and my father had stolen a horse to ride and find us an old country cottage to live in, but she never came back.
Anywho, back to my running. That lady couldn’t keep up for long now. She had on a honey brown dress that fell to her ankles, and she wouldn’t want to run too far from her apple stand for others to get the idea that stealing was alright. I turned for a half-second to see she was bent over huffing, and all she could do was shake her fist and yell one more scold “...you filthy rotten child! No wonder you’ve no one to look after you.”
That phrase had stopped stinging by the time I was seven.
I stopped in the alley right by the bookstore. I took a huge bite of the apple while going over to the garbage can. Maybe the librarian had thrown away another tattered book that would become my new book. Hey, a girl can dream. I practically lived in this alley, and the librarians knew it too.
But today was no ordinary day. Today I saw my doppelganger, breathless and afraid, her eyes never looking in one place for more than a second.
In her hand, she was clutching a crown that looked like it was worth more than everything I had ever owned in my entire 16 years. She shoved the shiny, priceless circle in my hands, then ran away.
I sat there staring at the thing while my brain mentally glitched. Someone had actually given me something.
Was this crown stolen, or was that really the Princess of Shilesberg?