The Whale in the Sky

By R Orr

Lottie never dreamt of running away. It always seemed like that would cause more problems than she already had. That was until a tiger-turned-human knocks on her window in the middle of the night, and offers to take Lottie to the Whale in the Sky, a place where magic and wonder exist, and where Lottie can escape everything, for good.

On the Whale, she meets the Whalers, the happy, welcoming people who also live there, and Modesty, an albino shapeshifter with a secret past. Overseeing it all is the Ringmaster, a mysterious figure whose magic is felt all around -- with his help she becomes the person she's always wished she was, Daisy, a girl who's confident and exciting, the exact opposite of Lottie. Yet, despite their carefree lives and festivals and fireworks, there's something strange about the Whalers and the Whale itself, and Daisy begins to find herself wrapped up in the layers of magic, losing more of herself every day.

With the help of friends both magical and human alike, she finds herself in a race against time to find the girl she used to be, before Lottie is lost forever to the magic of the Whale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Risks & Frills Books
• Release date: Feb 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370849642

Book preview

The Whale in the Sky

R Orr

© Rikki Orr. All rights reserved.

Tweet the author @rhansonorr

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter 1

I stopped suddenly when I saw it, right in the middle of the pavement. A man in a grey suit huffed very loudly as he moved past me, making it very, very, obvious that I had inconvenienced him. It was his own fault for walking so closely behind me, but anyway, he was unimportant.

Not compared to the whale.

It was an early summer day in June, and the sky was that kind of perfect clear blue that makes you want to jump up and go swimming in it. Only a few small, puffy white clouds drifted along, like sea foam, a bit aimless and wandering -- that was why it was so odd.

I was walking home from school with my two friends who lived the same way, Emily and Jade. Or rather, they were walking home together, and I was mostly walking behind them. The pavement is always a bit too narrow for three to walk astride, but we never seemed to take it in turns. They were giggling about Emily's new boyfriend, Jake Booth, who was one of the fittest boys in Year 9, and had asked her out last week.

It wasn't a surprise. Emily was one of, if not the prettiest girl in the school. Even the popular girls acknowledged her. Our other friends were all a bit average, like me, but we'd been together since primary school, sort of. It made sense that we just carried on all being friends. Sort of.

I could only hear bits of what they were saying to each other: what Jake had been saying to Emily at lunch, what he'd done in design and technology class with some bits of wood, analysing every word he'd said and everything he'd done. It was a bit boring, really, but I still wished I could be in the conversation.

Not that Emily or Jade ever noticed, but I pretended to be uninterested. I watched the people walking by us, and on the other side of the road, going home from school or work, going to the shops, whatever.

I sometimes made stories for them in my head to make up for the lack of anything else to do. Like the man who ran across the road in a rush, waving to a car in apology. He wasn't in a rush because he'd left the oven on, no, he was running because ten years ago his wife had mysteriously disappeared and---

Never! Jade suddenly shrieked with laughter. He never said that!

He did, Emily said with a smug smile. "And I bet he never said that to Faye Latham!"

Said what? I piped up.

Nothing, it doesn't matter, Emily said lightly, brushing me off with the smile still on her face.

Oh, right, I replied stupidly, trying to sound as airy as she had, ok.

So they carried on, and I went back to people watching as we marched down the high street, telling myself that it probably wasn't important anyway, that he probably just told her she had nice boobs or something. Faye Latham was Jake's ex, who was so tall and skinny she didn't seem to have any boobs at all -- but she did look like a catwalk model. Emily must have been so scared Jake would go running off back to her. I suppose I would be too; Faye was as beautiful as Emily.

It wasn't a hot day, but it was too warm for a black blazer, so I started to shuck it off clumsily without taking my bag off my shoulder. It was half-way through this action that I saw it.

I looked up at the sky, and I stopped very suddenly. In the middle of the almost completely clear, bright blue sky, was a tiny, dark grey cloud. It was shaped very oddly, a bit like a whale, and small like how a plane looks small from far away but isn't really small, and it was just there. It was just by itself, floating in the middle of the sky. Like a rain cloud, except tiny, strangely shaped, and completely out of place.

So there I stood, my blazer half off around one elbow and pulling my arm awkwardly round my back, staring up at the sky with my mouth open. It was a whale. Sometimes you could see shapes in clouds that look totally magical, like a horse's head, or a lady with long hair lying down, or a pot of gold that's spilled half the coins, but they were mostly blurry images; you really had to imagine to see them. This was perfect though, you didn't have to pretend at all.

The grey-suit-man huffed and puffed his way around me like a particularly grumpy steam train, and jolted me back to the ground. The man stomped off past Emily and Jade, who both gave him little smiles when he glanced at them, which he embarrassedly returned before speeding off.

"He wasn't that fit, Lottie, god," Jade said, catching me out of the corner of her eye.

Emily caught on and looked back as well. She laughed out loud, her pretty tinkly laugh ringing out like bells. Not like me. I sounded like a goose when I laughed.

So keen you're stripping in the street! Em put her hand to her mouth to cover her giggling.

No, I mean--- I blurted out without thinking. I pointed with my blazer-trapped side, making me look like I had a tiny t-rex arm. Did you see it?

What? asked Jade, looking up at the sky. Emily followed suit.

It was---

What, a plane? Jade interrupted.

They both glanced around, trying to see what I had pointed at. I looked back up to point a bit more accurately, yanking at my blazer.

But it was gone. The cloud had vanished into thin air, like it had never been there. I looked left and right, as if the barely-there-breeze had quickly pushed it along the sky, but it was nowhere to be seen.

I don't see anything, Emily said, sounding bored.

Nope, Jade agreed.

No, it was...

They both looked at me, uninterested and irritated, like I'd somehow ruined their fun. I swallowed hard, my little dinosaur arm retracting slowly as I tried to right my clothes and bag. I looked at the floor, forcing a laugh out. Of course they wouldn't care about a cloud shaped like a whale. That's the stupid kind of thing that daydreaming, childish Lottie cares about.

Yeah, no, I think it was just a plane, I said, it just startled me a bit, I mean, they don't normally fly over here, do they?

They looked at each other, pulling faces like they were trying not to laugh, but Jade let out a little snort anyway. Emily shook her head with a smile and they both headed off, leading right back into their conversation about Jake. I finally managed to get my blazer off, hanging it over my bag as I followed them on.

I didn't bother trying to say anything else to them on the way home, except the usual goodbyes as I split off from them to go up my street. It was a relief to walk the last little bit by myself: a bit of a weight lifted off my shoulders.

I hummed the theme song from my favourite cartoon, and felt a bit less stupid as it distracted me. The last time I'd sung it to myself, Cat, one of our other friends, had latched onto it immediately. She'd laughed and then said very loudly that she recognised it because her baby brother loved that cartoon. The others had had a little giggle at me then too, and even remembering it made me red in the face. I only sung it on my own now.

I imagined myself into the story as I turned onto our cul-de-sac, as an alien from outer space, protecting earth from others of my kind who couldn't understand humans and thought them an inferior life form. Sometimes I drew myself and the main characters like I was part of the team, but I kept them in a folder that never saw the light of day. I couldn't even begin to imagine how much I'd be made fun of if anyone saw them.

In today's fantasy, we went up to the whale in the sky, riding on alien technology and skimming through the clouds together as we tried to communicate with the whale. One minute the whale looked solid, and then it would dissipate into a grey cloud, whizzing through the air in twists and turns, letting a plane pass right through its cloud body.

Next door's little kids were playing on their bikes, and they thoroughly ignored me as I walked past, yelling at each other as they went zipping up and down the road and round the dead end. I walked a bit further in on the pavement. One of them had run right into me before now, and it'd be just my luck to have a five year old knock me into someone's flower bed on an already bad day.

Chapter Two

I fished my keys out of my bag as I walked up past Mum's car. The adult centre was only open till lunchtime on Friday's, which meant she had the afternoon off. She taught English GCSE as well as people learning it as a second language. It was good having someone to check my English homework, but she was even pickier than my actual teachers.

Hello, I called out as I took off my shoes in the porch and put them on the rack.

Hello, darling! came Mum's voice from the office down the hall. There's iced tea if you want it! How was school?

Fine, I lied as I headed in and threw my bag onto the stairs.

Good, good, said her disembodied voice. This was the answer she expected now. No problems at school, nothing to worry about.

I went into the kitchen and got a glass of Mum's iced tea, gulping it down before getting another, half-emptying the jug. I took it with me, along with an iced lemon biscuit that was, again, hand-made by Mum this afternoon. Mum loved baking when she had got the time, and she was amazing at it. I kept telling her she needed to apply for one of the competitions on the TV, but she always laughed and said she wasn't good enough for that. I thought she was, but there was no convincing her.

I just like making simple things that you lot eat, she'd say, not profiterole towers and ten different cheesecakes in a single sitting!

I grabbed my bag on the way upstairs, and walked past my sister's room towards mine. Her door was half open so I peered in. Beth was slumped on her bed with her laptop on her belly, music blaring out of the speakers. She was in sixth form now, doing her AS-levels, so she wasn't in all the time. When she noticed me, I waved with my spare hand, biscuit between my teeth. She spared me a look for about half a second before rolling her eyes back towards her screen without a reply, so I sidled out again and just went to my own room.

It wasn't that Beth was a horrible person. She just didn't seem to want me to be her sister.

I closed my door and dropped my bag where I was, shoving the biscuit into my mouth in one go and chewing rapidly to distract myself. It tasted so good I wished I'd brought two with me, but Mum always nagged when you ate too much before tea. It was her own fault for leaving nice biscuits out. I could resist it most of the time; Dad was the worst offender, and that's why he had a belly, but he didn't seem to mind that.

I'm gonna do one bit of homework, and then whatever, I said out loud, to no one but the mass of stuffed animals on my bed. I picked up a fluffy pink alpaca and pushed my face into it. It didn't smell very good, but it was very soft.

I got my maths textbook out, put some music on my phone, and started ploughing through some balancing equations. I was in top set for maths, but I wish I wasn't. I had to work my hardest just to stay caught up, let alone actually do well. I was much better at English, especially the creative kind. Writing stories was the most fun I ever had. I always included people I made up lives for on the street, like grumpy grey-suit-man. The next creative writing assignment we got I was going to write a story about the whale.

After a while I could hear, and then smell Mum in the kitchen, and after what felt like an age of x and y and sometimes z, I was finished. I threw myself face first onto my bed only for Mum to shout upstairs just as I landed.

Coming, Beth and I replied in unison.

Beth laid the table while Mum was dishing out, and I hovered nearby, waiting for the wooden spoon that had been in the mash pan. The front door sounded as I stood licking it clean, and Dad appeared in the kitchen, car keys in one hand and phone in the other. He couldn't go anywhere without his phone.

Perfect timing, Mum said, and went to kiss him hello.

My parents always seemed happy together. I'd never seen them argue, not like Jade's parents who always seemed to be arguing. Emily lived with her mum and stepdad and stepsisters, so her parents must have argued a lot too. It made me mega glad mine didn't.

We all sat down to tea together after dad had kissed my head too and said hello to Beth. She'd done something to make him angry and he still wasn't quite over it, though I didn't know what it was.

Dad told Mum about work for a bit -- he was always at meetings here there and everywhere, and sometimes he even got to go on business trips to places like Italy and Denmark and even America -- before he asked Beth if she'd been to college today.

No, it's my day off, she said with a shrug.

Oh, right, I always forget! He did always forget. What about you, Lottie?

Well, I have to go to school, I said to my carrots, pushing them away from the rest of the mash so they didn't touch and get any on them.

I know that much! He laughed this time. What did you have today?

P.E., History, Music, and English, I rattled off, hoping he'd leave it at that but knowing he wouldn't. I dreaded this conversation every night, though by now I was an expert fibber.

And what are you doing in P.E. at the moment?

Ugh, he just had to go for the worst one!

I shoved a forkful of mash into my mouth so I wouldn't have to answer immediately, though Mum and Dad waited patiently all the same. My stomach twisted horribly as I remembered it.

Was football today, I said with a gluey mouth.

How was that then? Mum chimed in. I'm not bad, athletically speaking, but certain aspects of hand-eye coordination escape me, and ball games tend to be one of them. Mum understood that much at least.

What you'd expect.

Well, you don't look injured, so some success then? Mum said, and her and Dad chuckled with each other while I forced a smile onto my face.

Are you with your own class for P.E.?

Yeah, they only divide us when we do swimming and they need to tier the classes, I said, trying to eat quickly between answering so I could excuse myself. I'd learnt to give proper answers. One-word replies only made them ask more questions.

So you've got some friends who'll pick you anyway. Mum smiled cheerily.

Beth snorted, but both Mum and Dad ignored it.

The truth was I didn't even get picked last today. I just didn't get picked at all. The team leaders had taken turns picking players from the class until there was only me left. Then they just kind of shrugged at each other and said