A Lily Story: The Alpha
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything. I don’t profess to own anything. I am fully cognizant of the fact that JK Rowling owns it all, and I am grateful for her genius.
A/N: This story is dedicated to my fabulous beta reader and "publicist" Lissanne Jones (no relation!) who is the best source of encouragement I could ask for.
Prologue
All things were quiet that morning in mid-July. The day had not yet started for most of the town. One of the few people who had begun his day was the newspaper delivery boy, who had crawled out of bed at 4:30 in the morning to begin his daily route. It was now close to 5, as he slurped the last bit of milk from his cereal bowl, set it down and tiredly rubbed his eyes.
"Stupid job," he muttered to himself. Most of his friends were asleep now, he thought. No, make that all of his friends. Why couldn’t he be spending his summer like them? Staying up til all hours of the night, sleeping late, then wasting away the entire day. That’s what I ought to be doing, he thought as he finished tying his shoes and stood up, stretching his arms over his head.
"Phillip?" came a voice from above. "Honey, shouldn’t you have left by now?"
Phillip stepped backwards out the kitchen and craned his neck around to look up the stairs at his mother, who was standing in the middle of them, looking almost as tired as he was.
"I’m just leaving now," Phillip answered in a voice barely over a whisper. He grabbed his bag off the kitchen table and went toward the front door. "I’ll see you in a bit."
Phillip’s mother smiled. She was so proud of him. Getting the paper route had been his idea, and as begrudging as he was in the mornings, she knew he secretly loved the job. "All right, then," she answered, as she watched him walk out the door. "Be safe," she muttered the typical maternal words, but it was too late. Phillip had already shut the front door. She smiled, shrugged, and then climbed back up the stairs.
Phillip stood outside looking at the early morning sky, which had not yet begun to show its colors. "Good God," he muttered. "I’ll never get used to starting my day in darkness."
The newspaper company had placed a stack of 30-odd papers on his front stoop, all waiting to be delivered to their respective subscribers. Phillip bent down and began rolling up the papers, reading the headlines as he worked.
There had been a world trade summit in London. "Why should I care," Phillip thought. "Can’t they find better things to write about?" Phillip didn’t bother to read the story. He rarely read the stories, unless they were about car accidents or robberies. Phillip was a typical 12-year-old boy.
After he had rolled all the papers and put them in his bag, Phillip took off down the walkway leading from his front door. He had a system – a paper-delivering system. And he was good.
This was Phillip’s second year as a paperboy. Every summer, the newspaper office held a contest to determine who was the best paperboy in the town. Last year, Geoffrey Stevenson had beaten Phillip by only four points. "Not this year," Phillip said out loud. "No, sir, not this year."
Geoffrey had the paper route on the next block over. Phillip considered it a good day when he didn’t run into him. Loud, pompous and arrogant, that was Geoffrey Stevenson. The entire Stevenson family, actually. No one much liked them.
Phillip began to the right. His route consisted of three streets – his, and two that ran perpendicular to his street. He would walk down to the end of his street, and then turn left on Huntington Lane, where he would walk up the right side, then walk down the left side, back to his own street. The he would go in the opposite direction until he reached Devin Lane, where he would do the same.
Devin Lane was Phillip’s favorite part of the route. He always went a little faster on Huntington, but was still very attentive to what he was doing. Phillip didn’t need to be reminded that old Mrs. Cutford liked her paper set on her rocking chair on the porch. Or that the Daniels liked their paper pushed in through the mail slot. Mr. Tanner liked his paper set in the plastic bag he always left outside, but Phillip didn’t really care. Mr. Tanner was a mean man who never gave him tips, not even at Christmas, and always found time to shout mean words to Phillip whenever he saw him during the day. So, Phillip kept inventing fun places to put Mr. Tanner’s paper. On this particular morning, though, he wasn’t feeling quite as imaginative as usual, so he stuck it straight-up in the hedge outside his yard.
But, as soon as he got to Devin Lane, Phillip slowed down. He walked up the right side, delivering the news to the Nolans, the Donovans, the Whittakers and the Ansons. The he started down the left side, dropping papers at the doorsteps of the Lorrins and the Claybornes. Then he stopped.
Phillip was standing at the house that made his entire paper route worth the effort. Whenever he got to this house, it no longer mattered that he had gotten out of bed a good four hours before his friends, that it was still dark outside, or that his shoulder was in pain from carrying the weight of 30-some newspapers.
He forgot all of his troubles as he looked the simple, white, 2-story house with the bright blue shutters and the red front door. The walkway up to the front door was lined with flowers of all sorts. There were roses and violets, chrysanthemums and irises.
But the flowers weren’t what Phillip liked about this house. Well, at least not the flowers planted outside in the garden. No, the flower that made it all worth it for him was the lily on the inside, sleeping soundly on the second floor.
Phillip made his way up the walkway, grinning from ear-to-ear. He set the newspaper down carefully on the Welcome mat, just where Mr. Evans liked it.
Everything was quiet in the Evans house, Phillip noted. It was a cool summer morning, not too chilly, but cool enough to leave the windows open, which was what the Evanses had done.
Phillip glanced in the window to the left of the red front door, peering through the cream linen curtain. He could barely make out the Evans’ living room furniture and staircase. He squinted his eyes, trying to make out the particulars of the room, trying to pry ever more into the life of the girl he so admired, but would never tell.
And then, behind him, a sudden noise made Phillip jump. He whipped around quickly and screamed, barely finding time to duck out of the way.
A large, brown owl had just swooped in from the sky, heading directly for Phillip’s head. That wasn’t its destination, of course, but it was a good thing Phillip jumped out of the way. The owl flew in through the Evans’ open window, tearing down the curtain as it went.
It fell with a crash, into the glass table that stood at the window, which shattered immediately. A few moments later, the light above the stairs switched on, and Phillip heard loud, frightened voices.
"Call the police," a man’s voice called. "No, no, stay in your rooms!"
Phillip grabbed his bag, which at this point had fallen off his shoulder, and ran faster than he ever had before. He didn’t finish delivering the remaining seven newspapers in his bag, but ran down Devin Lane, turned left onto his own street and didn’t slow down until he was in his own house, panting for breath.
Meanwhile, over at the Evans house, things were never going to be the same again.