1. The Secret Hero

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),

Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!

First Impression: This was a really intriguing little piece here. I think you ended up doing really quite well there. Its a very strong opening for both of the characters with some really solid dialogue there on top of some great descriptions to back it all up there.

Anyway let's get right to it,

I don’t know why I always walked past the school. I should’ve never wanted to see Ferris Elementary again. I also don’t know why I did what I did that day, because it was stupid and honestly irrational - stupidity and irrationality not two of my biggest traits. But the first day at Ferris Elementary had been even more of a day for those two things, by a mile. I’d seen him around town a dozen - no, a thousand times, walked past the school that gave me nightmares everyday as if bound by an unbreakable trance. But it made a difference when he was here at the school, molded like two puzzle pieces that hadn’t been put together for a long time.

Involuntarily my legs led me beyond the bend of the road where the Exxon station stooped, across 4th Street and up the cement steps to where he stood.

“Hey,” I said when I got to the last step, standing in the pool of his shadow as it was splayed out before him. He was leaning sleepily against the brick wall of the school, though I was sure that like me he still breathed in the faintest psychological remnants of the phantom flames. If there was anyone else to still be as haunted as I was, it was him, Seth Adams.

His face was turned to his feet, so all I could really see was his head of blonde hair and the end of his scarred-up nose. Despite the fact that I’d been the one to put those scars there, Seth looked up. In the light, he blinked his bright green peridot eyes, scrunched his eyelids around them to stare at me beyond the late-spring sun.

“Hey, Hero,” he said with the faintest sliver of a smile. I detected something else too though. Annoyance? Regret? To me, it looked more along the lines of forcedness, but I couldn’t etch out its reason. His next question was the one I'd been about to ask: “Why’re you here?”

“I come everyday after school. Just to…I don’t know…to be here.”

Seth nodded. “I have to pick up my little sister.”

“You have a sister now?” I asked. “Wow, guess it has been a long time. How old is she?”

“She’s, uh…well, she actually just turned eight.”

We were both quiet then. The same age we’d been, when…

…something I couldn’t even explain happened. Just as I’d seen it that day, I saw in Seth’s eyes now that this was the circumstance I couldn’t explain. And we couldn’t be together. No one could ever know what he’d done for me. Not even me.

“I didn’t know your mom had been expecting a kid when the fire happened,” I said feebly.

Seth nodded. “She’d been two weeks by then, but you couldn’t really tell yet. She hadn’t even let me know until the week after. And then my parents pulled me out of school, so I guess I never really got to tell you.”

It had taken four months to rebuild after the fire that had practically brought every single brick and mortar down. Seth had been my best friend, so I went to his house every day to ask if I could see him. His parents said no, he was too badly burned. He didn’t want visitors.

So I waited for school to start back up, after the months all of our classes had been home-schooling or commuting to the next town‘s school. Even when the school was built Seth didn’t come back that year. When he came back the next, I could hardly distinguish him as the friend I knew. Not because of any scars, all being ones that were my fault anyway, but because of how he acted. He was distant, from me and everybody, but from me especially.

For a second in his green eyes I saw a window to another dimension, a realm where the fire was not yet dead, where I was curled up in a ball at the corner of the room, forgotten in the panic, lost in this place that had once been my classroom. It had looked like a prison cell in Hell. Sparks leapt up to nibble away at the multicolored letters of the alphabet above the whiteboard, while beams and supports were cooked like logs in a campfire. I heard snaps and pops and groans, sometimes a person’s scream or cry. There was a door right there, across the room. But I was lost. I’d tried the door, but the handle had burned my hand in the small moment I’d left it there, blisters stinging down my fingers. My hair was pulled back by a big white bow, now singed with black holes here and there. The little rat in my hands, the whole reason I’d raced to the classroom in the first place, was struggling to break free from my hands.

And then the door opened. “Hero,” Seth said, a gangly little boy in a Dodgers hat, with an unusual backdrop for someone as calm as he was, walking towards me with his funny limping gait. “You gotta get outta here.”

“I-I-I…”

“You what?” he asked, looking at me quizzically. “You’re being silly. C’mon.”

How was he not scared? Or hurt? The hand he’d used to open the door was hot on my skin as he led me by my arm, but not blistered. He led me out into what I suspect had once been the hall, but now it looked like the gateway to the devil’s realm. He pulled me towards the right, weaving and ducking like a mouse in a maze, and only stopped when I protested some kind of pain.

“It’s hurting me, it’s hurting!” I bawled for the third or fourth time, coughing violently in the smoke that devoured us. I knew we were surrounded by climbing walls of fire. I knew there was no reasonable escape from this. Even then, I had some inkling of possibility. I wasn’t a kid of insane imagination. I knew that no path meant no escape.

Seth didn’t believe so. “Close your eyes,” he said simply, and though I didn’t know why I obeyed. Then I felt some kind of rush. An unexplainable pulsing of cold air, of Seth’s hand on my arm again, suddenly freezing cold. When I opened my eyes, we were outside. It was the back of the school.

“How did you do that?” I asked between fits of coughing.

Those peridot-green eyes said everything - No one can know.

And now for the first time, eight years since that day, I demanded to.

I can't believe I'm saying this to someone my own age, but... that was amazing! I'm terribly jealous of your incredible gift.

From the moment it began, everything- the characters, the setting, and the plot- crescendoed to a gut-spinning close. As my cynical mind rushed to criticize anything I saw, the next paragraph would toss me into a new field of understanding of Hero, and a new field of mystery for Seth.

Each word impressed me, and while no work is perfect, that was darn close to it. My only advice is to keep the crescendo going into the rest of the novel- never lull. Keep increasing the mystery and the reader's enjoyment the way you did here.