Ella | #Wattys2016 #JustWriteIt

On-Air with Her F-A-R-Y Godmother

Dawn was breaking, the roosters were calling, and the hills were alive with the smell of—

"Horseshit," Ella Cinders grumbled, balancing her pitchfork against her hip while she scratched her nose on the bend of her wrist. The heavy pollen in the air made both her eyes and nose water, and as much as she hated saying goodbye to her summer vacation, at least school starting in three weeks would mark the beginning of the end of allergy season.

Leaning on the pitchfork, Ella tried to blink away the feeling of sandpaper beneath her eyelids to no avail. She sneezed. Once, twice. Tears surged past her swollen and itchy ducts, and Ella cursed Virginia and its stupid trees. Stupid trees, stupid flowers, stupid grasses, and stupid, stupid, stupid wind that carried the damn pollens all around the state.

Careful not to touch her face with the dirty gloves she wore, Ella used her left forearm to wipe her cheeks. Then, she used her right arm to dab at her brow. It wasn't even six-thirty in the morning; how was it already boiling outside? Ella blamed the humidity. In fact, she blamed it for a lot of things. She blamed it for making her hair frizz so badly that she had to constantly wear it in a long braid. She blamed it for the puddles of sweat that she felt pooling beneath her pits. Most of all, if sunrise didn't make the humidity feel like the heat of Hades, then maybe — just maybe — Ella would be able to sleep in past five for once in her teenage life.

But she doubted it.

Margot, Ella's stepmother, was up every day at ten-past-four, like a masochistic robot without an Off switch. Like many early risers, Margot took great pride in her status as a morning person, and she always made a point of telling Ella how long she'd been awake if her stepdaughter dared to hit the snooze button on her alarm. Sun, snow, rain—none of that mattered to Margot. In her mind, the morning was made for working, and living on a farm meant there was plenty of work to go around.

Plenty of work, but, unfortunately, only a few people to do it.

Margot claimed that she divided the chores between her daughters and Ella evenly, but no one believed that was true. If it were, then Ella wouldn't be the one mucking out the horses' stalls for the fifth day in a row while Madeline and Clara pretended to dust the house.

"I love you girls equally," Ella said, mimicking Margot's squeaky voice as she took hold of her pitchfork again and stabbed at a pile of hay. She snorted before giving the pitchfork a little shake, watching the straw fall away until only manure and bits of soiled bedding were left. She tossed them into the wheelbarrow at the mouth of the stall with one quick motion. "But I love Ella just a little bit less."

A rush of sadness washed over Ella, her thoughts involuntarily drifting to a memory of her father's smiling face. From the moment she came into the world, she had always been a daddy's girl. She'd heard countless stories about what she'd been like as a baby, crying incessantly until her dad wrapped his arms around her. Within seconds, she'd be fast asleep, a feat that her poor mother hadn't been able to achieve after several hours of trying.

And, when her mom passed away shortly after Ella turned four, the grief Ella shared with her dad made their bond grow even stronger. They were inseparable, a perfect duo. It was them against the world and Ella wouldn't have changed that for anything. Eventually, though, her dad had grown lonely. He'd wanted to come home and be greeted by a woman rather than his little girl, though he promised that she'd always have the biggest piece of his heart. As a seven-year-old, it was hard for Ella to understand why her daddy needed more, and she'd secretly been thrilled when he came home from dates and told her that he wouldn't be seeing Janice, or Cindy, or Sam, or Trudy — or whoever — again.

Well, she'd been thrilled until the night she heard muffled cries coming from his bedroom. Just shy of nine, Ella had finally understood her dad's pain as she stared at him through the gap between his door and its frame. She wanted to run to him and hug him, but instead she'd slipped back to her room and stared up at the darkened ceiling. More than anything, Ella wanted her dad to be happy, so from that night on, she searched the sky for shooting stars and made the same wish whenever she spotted one: let her daddy meet someone special.