#julia b.

“What happened?” she demanded. Grandpa was something special, an inhabitant of a different world that was somehow lonely and bursting with people and places and things and ideas that you could coax out of him with a beer and basketball on the couch.

Ellie wouldn’t let anything happen to Grandpa.

“Miss Franks, please refrain from running in the halls.” The principal, Mr. Travis, was intimidating, but he was so tiny that Ellie at her relatively short five foot four could tower over him.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Mrs. Franks, we have her excusal slip right here. Give me a moment…” He wandered off in search of her pink slip.

“Ellie, it’s Grandpa. He’s in the hospital. The rest of us are over there right now.”

“Well—well, is he going to be okay?” She couldn’t stand this limbo. Grandpa was alive, Grandpa was dead. She had no intention to let her precious Grandpa become fate’s Schrödinger’s cat.

“It seems like it.” Ellie’s sigh of relief was enough to wake up Mrs. Tafferty, their sickly sweet school nurse, who was napping in her chair like usual, and that was a feat she could put on her resumé.

Mr Travis returned, holding the elusive excusal slip. Ellie’s mother placed a hand on her shoulder and looked at her like, “Quit bouncing your leg like a crazy person,” so she did.

“Take a few deep breaths while you’re at it,” her eyes added. The eyes were usually correct, so she followed those instructions as well.

The only time Ellie hadn’t listened to those eyes, her little brother Cody lost a lot of blood.

Special guest judge Christina Li had this to say about "A Well-Worn Window Seat": "It had an incredible first line and set up the story really well! Definitely one of the most memorable story beginnings I’ve read."