All the Colors

~Chapter 1~

Twelve year old Hannah Lynn had lived in a New York town house with her foster parents for five years, and was loved and accepted by the staff and family of the Delmonts that resided in the house. But one day her life would be shattered and she would again begin moving around from place to place trying to find a family that would take her in and care for her like they would for their own childeren.


It was thursday morning in late October, when Mrs. Delmont set off for work as she normally did. She kissed Hannah and her husband good bye and loaded herself into the limo. Hannah went off to Kenzington academy as she normaly did and Mr. Delmont left for work as he normaly did. But something was different about this particular day. Something that would end up changing Hannah’s life forever.

When Hannah Lynn arrived home she was surprised to find her father sitting in his high backed armchair. His sullen dark brown eyes stared into the burning fire beneath the harth. The light danced across the angled features of his face. “Whats wrong?” She asked quietly, almost afraid to disrupt the silence. A single solitary tear slid down her father’s cheek and fell off his chin onto the plush crimson apolostery of the armchair. “She died.” He whispered. “She died when a trackor trailer struck the side of her car killing her and the driver.” Hannah’s eyes widened as an overwhelming amount of tears started pouring uncontrolably down her ckeeks and onto her school uniform. She ran from the parlor and up the marble staircase to the library. But before she could reach the massive wooden doors that opened to the labyrinth of bookcases, she was caught by the head servant. “So he told you, did he?” Hannah just starred wide- eyed at the servant. “It’s not true. It couldn’t be true... Is it?” She questioned but she already knew the answer. “It is, I’m so sorry Hannah.” Hannah could feel her legs give out from under her. She pushed away from the servant and ran as fast as she could to the library door.

Once inside, the overwelhming smell of books and artifacts and even the slight scent of her mother’s perfume filled her nose. She stared up at the balchony that wrapped around the massive room. She wanted so badly to just open up her favorite book and be sucked into it’s pages. Far away from her problems, her worries, and all of the day’s events. She just wanted to disappear.

She started down the corridor that led to the small wooden ladder that took her to the balchony. She stared up at it. Her mother had asked the Head Servent to place it there so that Hannah could access the more challenging volumes that hadn’t been touched in years. She wiped her eyes and started to slowly climb the ladder to the wide square opening.

“My home, my sanctuary, my escape.” Hannah thought. She believed the words, and they became her only hope. The library became her only place in the whole world where she felt nothing could effect her. But she knew that her thoguhts and her safe blanket of fictional books would be shattered as soon as she left the library, and she would be forced to deal with her life, and not be able to escape to her books.

She started thruogh the historical artifacts and the volumes that went with them, to her favorite section... 19th century fiction.
As soon as she reached the monsterous boockcase she had been searching for she collapsed into a heap onto the floor. Her life had just been shattered, her world turned upside down. The one person that she felt had understood her was gone and she was alone again. She had the same feeling she felt when her parents dumped her on the doorstep of the orphanage. The sight of them driving away down the busy Brooklynn street, and her clutching her raggity stuffed bear that her mother had given her for her second birthday only two years before.
She knew that no matter how many books she read, no matter how long she spent in that library she could never go back to the ingnorant bliss she had enjoyed before her mother’s death. She knew; and yet she still tried to make the illusion real. She still spent long hours in the library praying that by some miracle any second her alarm would go off and she would finally realize it was all a horrible dream. But her alarm would never go off, and she would never again wake up to the sound of her mother’s voice. She would never again feel the warmth and love of her mother when she hugged her, and she would never again be able to say the words ‘I love you’ to her mother. And it terrified her.