Becoming Johanna (11 page)

“
You managed to gain
entrance the first couple of times through sheer, dumb
luck.”

He said it
matter-of-factly and without malice, but Johanna’s smile vanished.
Her mind immediately transported back in time to the orphanage in
which each child had been treated with such contempt, they couldn’t
help but feel worthless.

The headmaster of the
orphanage had been invited to sit in on the youngsters’ weekly
spelling lesson. Their teacher made a big fuss over him, and he
began drilling the students.

Johanna waited her turn
with both enthusiasm and trepidation. She wanted to excel, but she
feared humiliation.

“
Johanna, spell
judgment
.”

Johanna stood ramrod
straight, her excitement building. Her teacher had just gone over
the spelling the previous day, and Johanna had memorized it. She
really wanted to impress the headmaster, and she now had a chance
to shine.

“
Judgment,
j-u-d-g-m-e-n-t, judgment.”

Her teacher nodded his
head in approval until the headmaster shouted out,
“Wrong!”

Her teacher just stared,
his mouth hanging open.

“
There
is an
E
in
judgment
. J-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t.”

Johanna knew she was
right. She spelled it just the way she had been taught, and she
stood her ground. “I spelled it correctly,” she stated, with a
slight quiver.

“
You dare to challenge
me?” the headmaster bellowed. “Prepare to be punished
severely.”

Johanna looked to her
teacher for support, but found none.

The headmaster left the
room momentarily, and returned carrying a massive
Oxford English Dictionary
and a cat-o’-nine-tails. He scanned the well-worn dictionary
to letters beginning with
J
, and there it was:
j-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t. It didn’t matter that the OED also included the
other spelling; only that Johanna be punished for defying
him.

He whipped Johanna five
times in front of her classmates. Her teacher had betrayed her by
not defending her. Her so-called friends made fun of her
afterwards. As a result, Johanna learned to embrace isolation and
numb her feelings against pain.

“
What impressed me,”
Malcolm Trees continued, “is how you learned from it.”

But Johanna didn’t hear
his last sentence. She had already switched to self-preservation
mode. She masked her feelings of inadequacy with a harsh retort.
“Why don’t you just give me the parcels then, and we’ll be done
with it.”

“
Wait here,” he answered,
surprised at her sudden change of mood. Her curt manner made him
involuntarily retaliate. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t open any
books.”

“
Be quick about it, then.
I haven’t got all night.” Her own rudeness shocked her, but she
would rather die than let this little old man know he had the power
to hurt her.

The first parcel was very
large. “You’d better hold this with both hands. It’s an
encyclopedia, and lord knows what page it might open up to if you
should drop it. You could unleash the tidal waves caused by the
sinking of Atlantis, the hideous and painful boils from the bubonic
plague, or perhaps the bombing of Hiroshima. It could be
catastrophic.”

“
Where’s it
going?”

“
Look here,” he said,
thumping the top of the package. “It’s practically around the
corner.”

“
Is there a second
package?”

“
Oh. Yes. I have it right
here.” He walked over to the desk and took a miniature parcel out
of the drawer. “I’ll slip this into your pocket,” he said, matching
word to deed. “You had best deliver the larger one
first.”

The encyclopedia weighed a
ton, and Johanna rested it on the refectory table to get a better
grip. In doing so, she knocked Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
on the floor, and
the Ghost of Christmas Past sprang into action, conjuring up a
festive ball. In an instant, Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig danced around
the library, swirling to and fro, knocking more books onto the
floor. Suddenly, a young boy in a wheelchair began asking where he
could find
The Secret
Garden
. Trying to avoid him, the Fezziwigs
danced right into a British soldier, who held the body of
Gunga Din
. They all went
down hard, causing mass confusion.

“
Go,” the little old man
said, pushing Johanna toward the door. “I’ll deal with
this.”

Johanna suddenly found
herself alone in the dim vestibule, clutching the encyclopedia for
dear life. She didn’t remember actually walking out the door. She
felt almost as if the old man had transported her there by
magic.

She carefully placed the
large parcel on the seat of her car, and drove to the address
written on it. The old man had been right about the location. She
probably could have walked there if she weren’t afraid of dropping
the encyclopedia and unleashing who knows what.

After the first delivery,
she took out the smaller package and looked at the address. Her
stomach lurched when she saw
her
name and address on it. She slipped it back into
her pocket and drove home. She wanted to make sure she was
someplace safe and familiar before opening it.

Johanna’s attached cottage
could almost be called ramshackle, even though she worked hard
every weekend to keep it from deteriorating. She had a small living
room, a smaller bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a minuscule
bathroom—pleasant but humble. It wasn’t her dream home, but it was
all she could afford. She was only seventeen years old, and she
liked being able to say she lived in a one-bedroom flat, even
though she had friends with studio apartments larger than all her
rooms added together. Now it looked like she would lose her home to
a developer who wanted to build condominiums. Her landlord had
informed her she would have to move out by the end of the
year.
Perhaps my next flat will let me
have a cat,
she mused. At least one
positive thing might result from her dilemma.

She locked the door and
pulled down the shades before taking out the tiny parcel. It would
never do to have a neighbor witness something that might be
difficult to explain.

She sat on the diminutive
sofa in her living room and gingerly opened the package. Inside,
she found a small journal. It had the initials
J.C.
stamped on the front
cover.
My initials
.
How did the man at the library
know her name?

She began to lift the
cover but stopped suddenly, breaking into a cold sweat.
What if J.C. stands for Jesus Christ and they
start crucifying him here in my living room?
She imagined the crowd roaring for blood. She could
practically see the dust rising as Christ dragged the cross to the
field of execution. She smelled the sweat of the Roman soldiers
leading the way.
Or is that me?

She didn’t know what to
do. She thought back to her early years in school, when her
teachers forced her to sit through Bible instruction. She had
daydreamed through a lot of it, but was pretty sure no one had ever
mentioned Jesus Christ keeping a diary. She had to chance it; after
all, her address must have been written on the package for a
reason.

She opened the cover. The
fly page had been dedicated to her:

To Johanna
Charette,

You seek
Illumination.

May these pages embrace
your imagination and feed your soul.

Regards,

Malcolm Trees,
Curator

The Library of
Illumination

Malcolm Trees?
The little old man in the library had given her a
gift. She felt awful about having been rude to him. Maybe she
should bake him some brownies to smooth things over.
Does he even have any teeth?
She made up her mind. She would bake light, fluffy muffins.
She wouldn’t add nuts.

Carefully, she turned to
the first diary page. It had that day’s date on it. She removed a
tiny pen from a loop attached to the book. Then carefully, very
carefully, she wrote about the day’s events.

As she wrote, she
nervously looked up from time to time, expecting to see her words
come alive. But every word she wrote stayed firmly on the
page.

When she finished, she
locked the diary with a tiny key that had been tied to its blue
ribbon bookmark and slipped the key into her purse. She hid the
diary in the back of a cupboard, behind her supply of bathroom
tissue.
It should be safe here.

This is a work of fiction.
The characters, incidents, and dialogue are products of the
author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is
entirely coincidental.

No part of this
publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other
electronic, digital or mechanical methods, without the prior
written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other
noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission
requests, contact the publisher with “Attention: Permissions
Coordinator” in the subject line, at the address below.

[email protected]

Artiqua Press


New York



www.ArtiquaPress.com

BECOMING
JOHANNA

Copyright © 2016 C. A.
Pack

All rights
reserved.

ISBN:
09915428-8-6

ISBN-13:
978-0-9915428-8-8

About the Author

C. A. Pack is the author of the YA
supernatural series
Library of
Illumination/Chronicles of Illumination
,
as well as the historical fiction,
Code
Name: Evangeline
, and the fantasy,
Evangeline’s Ghost
. She
is an award-winning former journalist and television news anchor,
working in the New York metropolitan area. The author is a member
of International ThrillerWriters, and Sisters in Crime, and has
served as former president of the Press Club of Long Island. She
lives in Westbury, NY, with her husband, a couple of picky parrots,
and dozens of imaginary characters who constantly demand page
space.

Learn more at
http://www.carolpack.com