Some Kind of Happiness Read Online Free

nightmares before. This wasn’t the same thing.
    I knew something must be wrong, for me to feel like that. Something deep down where no one could see.
    Since then I have never told my parents when I wake up sweating, feeling hot and sick and small. Instead I write about the Everwood until nothing else matters.
    I never want to scare my parents again.
    I don’t want them to look at me like I am broken in a way they don’t know how to fix.
    (We are already broken enough; it’s the reason I’m here.)
    Gray light seeps in through the long white curtains of my bedroom, and I finally remember that I am not at home.
    Everyone has spent the night at Hart House. The twins made a tent on the porch. My aunts and uncles and cousins all live nearby, but apparently they do this a lot: sleep over like a bunch of kids at a party.
    Before I can talk myself out of it, I throw on some clothes and slip downstairs, out through the glassed-in sunroom attached to the kitchen.
    At first the backyard looks pretty typical: Thick green lawn. Swing set with two swings. Bushes overflowing with pink flowers. Wind chimes tinkling on the patio.
    There is no fence around the yard; Hart House is virtually in the middle of nowhere.
    A path of pebbles leads to a slope in the ground. I creep closer and see stone steps set into the dirt, leading down into a pit of leaves and grass. It is almost as if someone carved a pond into the earth, sucked it dry of water, and filled it with trees.
    There are so many of them that the air feels heavy and alive, like it’s full of people. But I am the only one here.
    Beyond the pit there is a small river. And beyond the river there are woods.
    There is no fence to block my view, nothing to separate my grandparents’ property from the woods beyond.
    Wind blows past me, pricking me with goose bumps. The branches overhead knock against one another. The leaves whisper and shiver and sigh.
    Something inside me unclenches.
    I have read stories where the main character encounters a door—a window, a gate—and on the other side lies a magical land where anything is possible. If, that is, you dare to step through.
    That is what I feel like right now: ready to leave the world I know and enter another.
    The trees tower over me; I am small, but I am brave, and my heart is everywhere inside me. My fingers tingle. Now.
    I take a deep breath and begin down the stone steps, into this pit that is another world.
    A rope swing hangs from an impossibly tall tree. I have never been so close to so many humongous trees; they must be decades old. Maybe even centuries old.
    Like the Everwood.
    I sit on the high riverbank and let my feet swing out over the water.
    In my stories about the Everwood, I have imagined a vast and tangled forest, a dense web of dark trees. I have imagined it to be dangerous inside, a forbidding place where only the wild-hearted live.
    In my stories I have never visited it. Others have, and I have collected their tales.
    But clearly they were wrong. I was wrong.
    This is the Everwood—this towering green place full of sunlight.
    And I belong here.
    I forget about wrong forks and Hart House etiquette and my bedroom as white as clouds. I smell dirt, decomposing logs, river water.
    Beneath these trees I feel the same way I have always felt when opening my notebook to a clean page:
    As long as I am here, I am safe.

NCE THERE WAS AN ORPHAN girl.
    She had been wandering for months, lost in an unfamiliar country.
    Sometimes her loneliness felt so overwhelming she found it difficult to continue her search—for family, for a home—but she always did.
    She wanted to see the world and discover its secrets. Curiosity burned inside her and kept her strong.
    One day a great forest came into view. The orphan girl’s heart stirred to see it.
    â€œI wouldn’t go in there,” warned an old traveling musician, playing his violin beside the path.
    â€œWhy not?” asked the orphan