CHAPTER ONE
Rickety Knees
“Two decrepit trolls sipping ice tea on the seashore in their underwear stood and peered at me through the palm fronds,” Gramps told me. I gasped—shocked. Though I shouldn’t have been. I knew growing up, that Grandpa Greene was the most fascinating man breathing. He had crossed oceans with pirates and deserts on dragons, spoke at least four different languages including elfish, tinkered with magic a bit and practiced sword fighting with a gnome. “So what you do?” He wicked at me. “I bolted through the trees.” “Did I ever tell you that when I was your age I caught a fish the size of a small whale with my bare hands.” His green eyes sparkling as he let slip his strange secrets, odd revelations about his shadowy past. “That same day I found a fairy in the …show more content…
“So, uh, did you meet any other monsters?” “Sure. A huge ogre covered in warts.” I eyed him skeptically across the table littered with our half-played games of checkers. “What? You don’t believe me?” I thought about it, looked at Grandpa’s face so honest, and open. What reason would he have to lie? “I believe you.” And I really did believe him—for a while, anyway—hanging on every word of his fables until in third grade when Big Mouth Ben announced to all the kids on the bus that I believed in goblins. I suppose, I had set myself up for the disaster by repeating Grandpa’s fairy-tales to a few kids at school. The rumor exploded like a bomb with a slow burning fuse and I was stuck with the nickname ‘imp turds’ and, fairly or not, I blamed him. Then when Wyatt Real locked lips with Isabel Marat during a field trip to the Museum of Whimsy, Ben let the cat out of the paper sack and I quickly became old news and back to being just plain, eight-year-old Aiden Greene, boy extraordinaire. After that, I stopped asking Gramps to tell me stories, and I think he was relieved. An air of secrecy closed around him and the details of his life, but I didn’t pry.
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Rickety Knees
“Two decrepit trolls sipping ice tea on the seashore in their underwear stood and peered at me through the palm fronds,” Gramps told me. I gasped—shocked. Though I shouldn’t have been. I knew growing up, that Grandpa Greene was the most fascinating man breathing. He had crossed oceans with pirates and deserts on dragons, spoke at least four different languages including elfish, tinkered with magic a bit and practiced sword fighting with a gnome. “So what you do?” He wicked at me. “I bolted through the trees.” “Did I ever tell you that when I was your age I caught a fish the size of a small whale with my bare hands.” His green eyes sparkling as he let slip his strange secrets, odd revelations about his shadowy past. “That same day I found a fairy in the …show more content…
“So, uh, did you meet any other monsters?” “Sure. A huge ogre covered in warts.” I eyed him skeptically across the table littered with our half-played games of checkers. “What? You don’t believe me?” I thought about it, looked at Grandpa’s face so honest, and open. What reason would he have to lie? “I believe you.” And I really did believe him—for a while, anyway—hanging on every word of his fables until in third grade when Big Mouth Ben announced to all the kids on the bus that I believed in goblins. I suppose, I had set myself up for the disaster by repeating Grandpa’s fairy-tales to a few kids at school. The rumor exploded like a bomb with a slow burning fuse and I was stuck with the nickname ‘imp turds’ and, fairly or not, I blamed him. Then when Wyatt Real locked lips with Isabel Marat during a field trip to the Museum of Whimsy, Ben let the cat out of the paper sack and I quickly became old news and back to being just plain, eight-year-old Aiden Greene, boy extraordinaire. After that, I stopped asking Gramps to tell me stories, and I think he was relieved. An air of secrecy closed around him and the details of his life, but I didn’t pry.
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