One Small Wish: Day 7

Word Count: 42,088

Summary of Events:

Vaughan was setting up to spend a lonely Sunday afternoon waiting for it to be time for him to play St. Nicholas when Chelsea called; she came over and they got talking about him moving out of his parents' house and getting a place of his own. Fancy and Grandma were invited outside to attend a make-believe tea hosted by Eirenna and Shelena and Grandma declared they should have a real, indoor tea party the next Sunday. On his lunch break Vaughan went to the elementary school in the St. Johns neighbourhood to see if he could get enough information to fill out an entry form for the girl he'd encountered in the hallway . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

"Vaughan himself flipped over the back of the photo and looked at the name: Eirenna Maple. He turned it over and looked at her face again.

She was an incredibly beautiful child. He wondered what her mother looked like.

Starling, he shook his head. Why did something like that matter?

"What do you need for your entry form?" the receptionist asked, thankfully distracting Vaughan.

He drew out the blank form he'd managed to snitch before starting his double-shift of torture yesterday and unfolded it.

Taking up a pen, the woman looked between the screen and the form. She neatly copied down Eirenna Maple and put a six in the age category before stopping and looking up at him critically.

"I trust that this is given in confidence?" she asked.

"After the contest period closes on Christmas Eve all forms are destroyed," Vaughan replied. "Confidentiality is one of the St. Nicholas program's top priorities."

Including, he wryly thought to himself, confidential destruction of forms for contestants arbitrarily deemed undesirable, with about as minimal care and forethought to the action as Hitler and the Nazis had used when rounding up and killing Jews, Gypsies, mentally handicapped, and more. As unjust as it was, the topics of Hitler, the Nazis, and the war crimes of the Second World War had been one of his favourite classes, and he'd done extensive further research on the topics — part of what had contributed to his run of ninety nines in that class.

Bringing himself back to the present, Vaughan watched as the receptionist filled out the form neatly, clearly, and with the efficiency of someone who'd filled out a lot of forms over the years.

According to the form little Miss Maple lived on North Swenson Street, her birthday was in September, and she lived in a single-parent household.

Vaughan wondered if the fact that single-parent versus two-parent had to be indicated on the form was a determiner as to which forms got shredded. If it was, his guess was that the single-parent kids got their forms shredded, considering that the program discriminated against poorer kids.

"Here you are Mr. Ashbaugh," she said, holding out the form to him.

"Thank you very much," Vaughan said. "Hopefully I can convince the people who do the name-drawing of the prizewinners to grant her wish, even if her name isn't drawn. She's probably the most deserving contestant I've encountered over the course of the campaign to this point."

"I think it would make a lot of difference to her," she said, putting away the pictures he'd looked through. "Not that she's a sad child, but, having known her mother when she attended here, I know that family well enough to know the poor people can't hardly catch a break, it seems."

Vaughan nodded.

"I mean, few of the families whose children come to this school can," she went on, putting the pictures back into the drawer. "But the bad breaks for the Maple family aren't the same sort of bad breaks everyone else gets.""