Weekly Story: “THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STORY” #1 - Eliot

Unfortunately, the light pink colored pencil had gone missing. Exactly the color I was looking for to draw the flower on the scarf of the beautiful doctor girl. The girl in my coloring page smiled kindly. I had chosen this coloring page especially for tonight. My brother didn't come back until late and the drawing was very detailed. I had worked on it all afternoon to satisfy my impatience. Today I had gotten a good grade in math and I couldn't wait to tell my brother. The teacher praised me for the good result, because this was the first time in months that my grade was above average. Lately I had a lot of trouble concentrating, but this good hope made me feel that my dream of becoming a doctor could still come true. I decided that I would work very hard to do well. I grinned. If my brother heard me say this, he would laugh at me and say that it is too early to start dreaming at the age of nine. He told me to play and not to worry. But not worrying was impossible, last month my mother died of an alcohol addiction. My father had left us after I was born. Not that I got along with my mother that well. Only her house was important to me and my brother. When she died, we found out that she had a lot of debts and we had to stay with a friend of my brother's for a week: Eliot. It was very cozy and I watched television for the first time on a clean couch. After a week my brother had found a kind of shed. We stay dry there and we had been given beds and furniture by Eliot.

I was still sitting over my coloring page when the front door closed. My brother was finally home. I ran downstairs happily and gave him a big hug from behind. "Look, I got a A- in math," I shouted. "Eliot really helped me!" My brother picked me up and hugged me back. He looked tired and had had a hard day. Still, he was very happy. "That's great," he said after a long yawn. While I was coloring, I had imagined that he would make me my favorite soup as a reward, but I didn’t dare ask him that now. “Shall we go to the restaurant to celebrate?” By “the restaurant” he meant the fish stall around the corner where all you could eat was old crabs, but I agreed because he had made the effort. I went to pack my things and imagined that tonight I would make a plan of action to convince Eliot to help me with every subject. I put on my new scarf - also with flowers - and helped my brother put away the colored pencils. He was talking angrily to someone on the phone, but when I came to stand next to him, he immediately hung up the call.

We walked together to the fish stall when I saw a poster in the window. ‘Come here to study for your dream job!’ I was excited. How could it be that I had just thought of it and that it was now hanging in front of me? My brother had walked on because it was very cold and snowing. But I couldn’t take my eyes off it. There was a man reflected in the glass. I looked at it for a while and was startled when he came closer. I didn’t move. Luckily I saw Eliot’s face smiling at me. Two birds with one stone. I started asking for the tutoring and then saw my brother turn around very quickly.

—> next passage: next week = 3 december 2024