Young Adults Books
DANI SERIES BOOK THREE
STAND FOR SOMETHING -Or- THE BLOOD NEVER FORGETS
Excerpt
Chapter One
It is the twenty-first day of June, 2018, and the sun is bright and clear, the temperature in Languishire a balmy seventy. There isn’t a cloud to be seen in any direction, and Dani has just been handed her final ninth-grade report card. On this, the first day of summer and the official start of summer recess, Dani Sentini opens the brown envelope and hardly believes what it says. She gasps there at her desk, and the other students of her homeroom turn to look at her. She’s going to take home her best grades ever! With her lips parted in sheer awe, her eyes as wide as dollar coins, she follows her final grade report, starting with English—A; Algebra—B; History—B+; Home Ec—A+; Science—B+; Art History—A; and a super fabulous best grade ever in Phys Ed—a big, no-longer-fat A+!
The plus, according to Miss Leisha Hilton’s note:
“For being the most physically
improved student in the galaxy!!!”
Dani doesn’t have to read Miss Hilton’s note to know she’s improved (nor does anyone else); all she has to do is look in her formerly too-slender mirror and feel as incredible as she looks.
But when homeroom lets out and all the other students head for summer freedom, Dani Sentini turns and heads down the hall to Mr. Mann’s classroom, carrying the note he left for her in her mail folder: “Please stop up and see me as soon as possible—room 218, Building B.”
Since her bus is waiting, she hurries down the corridor through the breezeway to Building B of the high school campus. Once inside the high school building, she hurries up a flight of stairs. All she knows is Mr. Mann’s a senior English teacher. What would he want to speak to her about? At the top of the stairs, she turns left. The room is on the corner. But he isn’t there. She goes to the office and they track him down. By that time, the building is about empty and the buses are starting their engines.
“Miss Sentini!” Mr. Mann is hurrying down the hall and they meet at the door. He gestures for her to enter. “Thank you for stopping in. I wanted to speak with you about an exciting new writing class I’m teaching in the fall. But I’m afraid it’s late and I don’t want you to miss your bus.”
“What sort of writing class is it?”
“It’s a creative writing class we’re offering for honors credit for juniors and seniors, but we’re offering seats to a few sophomores who’ve excelled in English. And we’re putting together a series of future courses on literature studies, which will include a unit on Native American Literature in the spring semester. Mrs. Kanbury let me read your term paper and I was quite impressed, as was she.”
“Wow! I’m honored to be invited to take the class. I’d love to take it.”
Dani and Mr. Mann discuss the program for some minutes there. “Our emphasis will be on writing short stories, but students will be free to write poetry if they prefer.”
“I’m thinking of writing a novel. I already have it pretty squared up in my head.”
“A novel!”
“I’m putting something together as an expansion to my essay “The Emergency Plan.” I think there’s a larger story there that will involve Harmony Mountain. I have family who live over there, and there’s a solid story I want to research over the summer.”
“Indeed! I’d love to see what you come up with. Perhaps in your case, instead of a short story, as a semester project, you could complete an outline and a chapter or two.”
“I’d love that. Yes. Now I have motivation!”
He explains the creative writing unit was announced in the recent issue of the school’s newspaper, but he was worried that she had not yet signed up for it.
“I’ve been so busy writing the Home Ec paper and working, I never even saw the last issue of the Tapphauni Muse,” she says.
“I’m so glad we had a chance to talk about it. Perhaps you’d have time to stop into the office and register for it now. I’d hate to see you miss out. There are only a few seats open. I really think you should register today. I’d be happy to give you a ride home if you miss your bus.”
“Thanks, but it’s only a few blocks to walk home. I’ll sign up right now.”
Dani heads directly to the main office where the secretary finds the sign-up form. There is some confusion among the office staff about which course it is, and by the time they settle everything, it takes a half an hour. So that it’s about forty-five minutes since the buses left before Dani sets out for home. But walking about fifteen blocks home on a bright summer morning is nothing to a girl who’s just been invited to join an upper-grade writing course, who’s just gotten the best report card of her life, and whose body now weighs about seventy pounds less than it did a few months ago.
With her feet seemingly weightless, she walks west down Purnell Street, turns left at Elm Street Extension, and walks south toward South Main, feeling so energized she could fly—finished with the ninth grade, finished with Junior High, just turned sixteen today, and just signed up for a semester of writing her novel for school credit! What more could a girl ask for?
Well, one thing she could ask for is a crystal ball.
How exactly will the pages of her life (novel) turn this summer? She thinks and walks and thinks—thinking about the summer to come and of her boss’s son, the tall, blond-and blue-eyed-popping handsome nineteen-year-old Flavio Cantonia who’s home from college and will be working with Dani on his grandmother’s apartment houses—with Dani as his “boss.”
At this idea she grins at the irony of it.
But still, it’s true. Flavio’s father, Tommy, who actually is the boss in charge of managing his mother, Marian’s, apartment houses, appointed Dani foreman of the work team.
You think ahead and pay attention to details. You take the initiative without being asked to. You show up every day on time. And you don’t let your brother Louie dog it. You bring so much energy to your work you even inspire me!
Those were his exact words when she took Tommy Cantonia aside privately and asked why—why her? How does a just-starting fifteen-year-old girl get somehow promoted to boss it over her co-workers, least of all Tommy’s own son Flavio?
When Dani gets as far as Morgan Street Extension, she crosses North Elm and bears off to the right, taking Morgan. She walks several blocks due south now, crossing Main and continuing down Morgan to cross Church Boulevard. Crossing here takes forever waiting for the walk light. But she hurries across the six lanes and goes on down Morgan. Her house is number three-O-four.
Of course, she had begun hearing the sirens at about Fredrick Street, right before she crossed North Elm. And there she’d had to wait for a police car with its siren wailing. She hurried across the street to get ahead of the fire engine which also had its horn blaring. Honest to God, you’d think the world was coming to an end. She’d had to put her fingers to her ears and almost choked on the dust of it all, whirling and billowing up from the pavement like a screeching sandstorm in a freaking desert!
And now there are more sirens going every whichaway. She looks over the sky to see if there’s any smoke rising. They all seem to be heading somewhere south, and way down the street she can see police cars and ambulances wailing west across Morgan heading over toward Stacy Ann Hastings Memorial Park.
But there are other police and ambulances going the opposite way. It’s as if they don’t know where to go or even which way is up.
It could be another of those gang fights at the park. The boys of the competing gangs going at it over disputed territory. The last one brought in most of the police of the whole city and involved a dozen boys.
As she walks, she can hear sirens over on the east side on Avenue of Commerce South and down where the hospital is. There’s more of the deeper sirens of fire engines, using their bellowing horns to butt traffic out of the way as they come on Church Hall and turn down Garfield.
You know there’s a big fire when the fire engines blow their horns so loud it makes the trees shake. The little narrow City of Languishire is like a Y-shaped thing with a river and a large stream converging in the middle. All these sirens and horns seem to bellow up between the low hills like a megaphone. She keeps looking up, looking for the smoke. As you might expect and may have done yourself a time or two, she pays closer attention to the sky above her own house, spying through the tree tops as she walks looking for a tower of black smoke. Even without seeing any smoke there, she hurries along more quickly, feeling somehow pushed or pulled from some phantom of urgency that’s building in her gut. In her mind, she sees fire pouring out of the windows of her house and worries about her teddy bear, Marco, who sits on top of the neatly arranged pillows of her bed.
Dani crosses Church Boulevard, after more noisemakers pass, and looks more urgently down Morgan, now a straight line ahead of her. Even without there being any sign of smoke in the sky, she can’t help but agitate, that thing in her gut causing all sorts of visions to pop into her head—what an irony to come home on such a wonderful day as this to find her house on fire, smoke pouring from its windows, and firemen pouring water in! God help poor little Marco!
And God help her, that area around three-O-four does seem busy with sirens. She draws a deeper breath and hurries faster yet, really now pushing her brand-new slender legs into something like a footrace, one trying to outstretch the other.
On the other hand, in Languishire, one hears sirens all the time and rarely can one walk up-town without getting a glimpse of a red fire truck or a police car racing to somewhere or other. If one didn’t know better, they might get the idea that the fire and police departments get paid by the miles they drive.
Just as she’s considering the idea of carrying earplugs in her pocket, she notices something up ahead that sets her heart beating quicker. Up ahead in the vicinity of her house, a black and white police car has pulled over and parked. Its lights aren’t flashing, but it’s still a cop car and seems to have parked directly in front of her house. But it’s hard to tell from this far away. She stretches her legs even more and swings her arms in a power walk.
As she walks, she sees the police officer walk up to a house and knock on its door, but it’s a few blocks ahead still, and she can’t see whose house it is for sure, but it certainly looks like it could be her house.
Sixteen-year-old Dani Sentini, measuring five feet six inches tall last time she measured herself and now weighing a clean and lean one hundred and fifteen pounds, reaches down inside herself and somehow finds a way to swing her arms even faster, finding this somehow causes her legs to grow longer.
Whose door is that cop knocking on?
Copyright @ 2025 H.R. Novelton
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