Triplets - Part 1

Good morning Favorite Friday Fiction Fans,

It's a very warm morning here at my grandparents' house. Yesterday it was 102º with a heat index of at least 109º. Ugh! That's too hot. We are heading home late morning. We've had a good time up here this week celebrating Grandma's 91st birthday. You probably wouldn't guess she was 91 if you saw her. And you wouldn't have a clue that Grandpa was 90! I helped Grandma clean out some things, and we worked puzzles, and every night we played Dominoes. Have you ever played Dominoes?

Since I'm still doing Camp NaNo even though I'm on vacation, I tried to get a little writing in. I was hoping for 100 words a day. My total since being here is 1,313 words. It may not seem like much, but seeing as how I don't usually get Anything written while I'm here, this was really good.

But now I'm ready to get back home and get to work! I have the Five Fall Favorites to get to work on now that we have all our bloggers. I need to work on the blog tour for Angie's and my book releases (If you want to help with it, let me know), I have emails to reply to, writing to do, books to read, and the list goes on. But it has been good to spend time with my grandparents. And my aunt.

Okay, this is a story I was going to enter in a writing contest, but I felt that something was missing from the story. Not sure if it wasn't long enough, or if there wasn't enough background, or if it was something else that was off. Anyway, here's the first part of the story. You can tell me what you think of it.

Triplets

Part 1

    “Come on, Sofia!” Vienna waved her arm to get her sister’s attention, then pushed back her long hair. Some people called it blond–that was before they saw Sofia’s hair–but Vienna thought of it as brown. Just plain brown. There weren’t even any curls in it like Sofia had. It was just straight brown hair. Long and straight. Geneva had chopped her hair off a few weeks ago leaving it just below her shoulders, but Vienna didn’t want to just chop hers off, she wanted it to look nice after it was cut.
    “Sorry,” Sofia apologized breathlessly. “I had to stop twice to tie my shoes. These laces are so broken that they don’t like to stay tied. Where’s Geneva?”
    Vienna pointed to a lone figure down the block. She sat on a stone wall and looked up into a leafy tree, no doubt watching a bird or squirrel. The early summer sun flashed off the rims of her glasses. “She’s waiting for us there. Come on, let’s go explore.”
    “Right with you.”
    Quickly the two girls hurried down the quiet street. Geneva joined them, and together the three girls, with arms linked, turned down a side street and followed the uneven pavement of the road. From the back, the three girls looked nothing like sisters for Geneva was a good two inches shorter than her sisters, and Sofia had blonde hair, but if you studied their faces, a resemblance was there–though some people never saw it. A glance often mistook them for friends, and they were. Best of friends. They were also triplets.
    “Oh, look!” Sofia pointed to an old brick building. The farthest side was nearly hidden with vines and brush, but the side near the road was clear of vegetation. There was no house nearby, so the girls hurried over to it.
    “No windows,” Geneva complained, eyeing the front of the building with a frown.
    “Maybe there are some in the back,” Vienna suggested. “But there’s no door on this side either, so maybe this is the back.”
    Following a sort of alley near the structure, the girls soon reached the back of the old building. For several minutes they paused and looked. A few tall trees stood near the structure reaching out leafy arms, while ivy grew in frofusion all around. It crept up the trees and even up the red brick walls, creating a charming contrast.
    “There’s windows, Gen,” Sofia said, pointing “But they’re kind of high up.”
    “We can make a step with our hands, and each of us can take a turn looking in.” Vienna was curious about the old building. What was it? Where was the door? And what was it used for now?
    Stepping from the alley into the grass, Vienna and Sofia started forward, but Geneva hung back.
    “Um, what if that’s poison ivy?”
    “It’s not, Geneva,” Sofia said.
    And Vienna added, “It’s some kind of English ivy, I think.”
    “You don’t know?” Geneva hadn’t moved.
    Vienna looked at Sofia. Ever since Geneva had gotten a bad case of poison ivy when she was seven, she had always been timid around any kind of ivy. “No, I don’t know what it’s really called, but it looks just like the stuff that grows over those houses in England. You know, the ones in those old movies.” Vienna wasn’t really sure it was the same stuff, but she knew it wasn’t poison ivy. “Come on, let’s look in the windows.”
    Pushing her glasses more firmly on her nose, Geneva cautiously advanced. “Are you sure it’s not poison ivy?” she asked again.
    “Positive.” Sofia led the way confidently.
    Behind her, Vienna waited for their triplet. “Come on.”
    Slowly Geneva stepped behind the old shed and then stopped. “What if it is poison ivy?”
    “It’s not, Gen,” Vienna assured. “Poison ivy has three leaves and red in the middle, remember? These don’t look anything like that.” She held out her hand. “Sofia’s waiting for us.”
    With reluctance Geneva stepped into the ivy, cringing as she did so.
    When they were all gathered under the first window, they looked at each other.
    “Who’s going to look first?”
    “You are,” Vienna said.
    “Yeah,” Geneva echoed. “You saw the windows first.”
    Sofia shrugged. “Okay. Make a step and I’ll look in.”
    Though Geneva shrank from getting too close to the wall where the ivy grew, she clasped hands with Vienna. Quickly Sofia stepped up and held on to the bottom sill of the window.
    “It’s dark inside, so it’s hard to see,” she remarked, trying to cup one hand on the glass to shade her view from the sun. “I don’t really see anything. Coming down!” With a quick, light push from her foot against the wall, Sofia jumped backwards, stumbled a little when she landed, then straightened. “Who wants to look next?”
    “What’s the use if we can’t see anything?” Geneva rubbed her hands and eyed the ivy again distrustfully.
    Instead of answering, Vienna moved farther down. “This window doesn’t have any glass,” she remarked. “Why don’t we try this one? Geneva, you can look first in this one if you want.”
    But Geneva shook her head. “There might be something creepy in there. You look first.”
    Soon Vienna stood on her sisters’ hands and, folding her arms on the windowsill to try and keep as much of her weight off them as possible, stuck her head in the open window. All was dark and quiet. Strange objects could be seen, but in the darkness it was impossible to tell what they were. “I can’t see much,” she started, “but–”
    A loud creak, a rattle, and then a moaning sound startled all three girls. Geneva, forgetting her job of holding up her sister, jumped back, and Vienna, trying to hurry down, lost her footing, clutched vainly for a hold on the brick wall, and fell with a slight cry.
    “Let’s get out of here!” Geneva begged, her eyes wide and terrified behind her glasses.
    Sofia, frightened from her usual composure, nodded. “Yeah. You okay, Vivi?”
    Scrambling to her feet, Vienna felt her heart pounding. “I think so. Let’s go!” Her arms and hands stung from their scraping along the wall, but she ignored them.

Have you ever gotten poison ivy?

Would you have been scared by that noise?

Do you play Dominoes?

P.S. How do you like the new background?