Dangerous Danielda

By Jim Sellers

Danielda is a smart, friendly, thoughtful ten year old who can't seem to avoid getting in trouble. No matter how hard she tries and how careful she is, disaster follows her everywhere. Nothing and no-one is safe around her no matter how much she insists that the things that happen aren't her fault.
But this time, she is determined to change things. It starts on the first day she takes the bus to school. Nothing will go wrong anymore.
Except.....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Sellers
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9780994841469

Jim Sellers

I have been a writer, producer and editor of video productions since the 1980′s. My work has been on almost every network in Canada and the US including CBS, NBC, PBS, Family Channel, CBC, Global, Discovery, and so on. Although I’ve been writing since forever I signed my first professional writing contract in 1994. As soon as I realized I could make a living doing something that I enjoyed as much as I do writing, that became my primary focus.Like a lot of boys, I lost interest in reading when I was old enough to call myself a guy. Friends, games (not the online kind, they didn’t exist yet) and television dominated my life. I rediscovered the joys of reading at around 13, when I was lucky enough to have a teacher who convinced me that the power of imagination was far better than anything I could see in movies and TV. Since then I have been challenging myself to read more and different works and to understand the strength and differences of each type of writing, whether it is comics and graphic novels, classic fiction from other centuries or science fiction and fantasy. This has helped expand my writing, which I hope you will see in my books.

Book preview

For Anyone feeling awkward as they grow up.

Being different is good.

CHAPTER ONE

CHANGE

WAIT. WHERE AM I?

Danielda stood frozen with fear, her feet unable to move. She stood in the center of a huge store, which was filled with nothing but massive tables stacked with delicate glass trinkets, piles of china plates and crystal drinking glasses. Between each of the displays was a narrow aisle, barely wide enough to walk through, with many of the fragile ornaments hanging over the edge, inviting disaster. Danielda found that she was pushing to a ridiculously oversized shopping cart that scarcely fit through the aisle. The cart felt heavy with sticking, wobbly wheels that steered left and right as they turned, making it harder to control. The store was so large she couldn’t see past the piles of glassware to the far away doors.

She couldn’t remember how she got there, but Danielda could hear her mother calling. She had to move. Sweat formed on her hands making her grip slippery on the thick, plastic handle. Danielda could hear the sounds of the store, music from hidden speakers and distant voices, but there were no other people in sight. Only the urgent, demanding sound of her mother calling.

C’mon, Danielda. We have to go!

She forced herself to move, pushing the defiant cart forward. It felt heavy and she saw it was filled with bricks, big heavy blocks. As she pushed, the cart’s front wheels pulled left and right, threatening to slip out of her grip and collide with the shelves full of glass. Straining with effort and groaning with frustration, she couldn’t remember why she had to push this cart full of bricks through a giant glass shop, but that didn’t matter. She needed to get to the exit and find her mother. She stopped and looked anxiously for a door or an exit sign, or someone to help. All Danielda could see was glass, glinting in the light. The glasses were stacked like pyramids, twenty or thirty rows high. Why would someone do that? The pyramids stood on shelves barely wider than the glasses themselves. On the shelves were small, printed signs that said, you break it, you bought it. It was a disaster waiting to happen and Danielda stood in the middle of it.

She took a deep breath and concentrated all her strength on the handle, pushing the massive, clumsy cart slowly around each table, like a maze. The cart kept pulling to one side, then the other. Her progress felt painfully slow and, on top of that, she urgently needed to pee. Slowly, the cart rolled past each of the tables, around this one, back around the next, her sweating hands slipping on the handle and her arms ached. Suddenly a front wheel swiveled and the cart slipped form her hand, lurching toward one of the tables and tapping it slightly. The tall stack of glasses shivered threateningly but didn’t fall. Danielda froze in position and held her breath as the sound of the glasses rattling gradually settled. She exhaled, and doubled her efforts to control the cart as she rolled carefully around the last table.

She stood, finally, in front of the doors. She made it, and not a single glass broke. Danielda wiped her hands on her shirt and exhaled. She pushed the handle of the cart toward the doors and freedom. Except, that a single tablecloth under one of the stacks of glasses hung down to the floor. As Danielda pushed her cart toward the door, she stepped on the cloth and it tugged out from under the stack of glasses. They toppled over with a deafening crash. Those glasses fell on to the next table and the next, until the stacks of glasses started falling over like an endless line of dominoes, all pushing into the next pile. The momentum built until the tall shelves behind them fell over into the larger stacks. The sound of shattering glass grew louder and continued for what seemed like an eternity. It sounded almost like a waterfall and, over that, she heard her mother calling. Danielda felt the world falling away from her.

It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault, she sat up screaming. Then she was awake, startled by the sound of her own voice. When she opened her eyes she saw her mother standing in her doorway, wrapped in a towel and looking confused. The sound of the shower hissing behind her.

What’s not your fault? she asked.

Danielda sighed with relief. There was no store, no glasses, no disaster and she hadn’t broken anything. Her mother continued to stare at her.

Nothing, I was dreaming, Danielda rubbed her eyes and flopped back on her pillow.

I’ve been calling you forever, her mother said, You have to get up now and get ready for school. Go make your breakfast, I’m taking a shower.

Danielda remembered she had an urgent need to pee, Wait, I have to go to the bathroom. She threw off the covers and ran past her mother, slamming the bathroom door.

The sound of the shower continued as Danielda sat at the kitchen table, eating cereal and thinking about the coming day. Sunshine lit the apartment with a promise of a warm, early autumn morning. The leaves starting to change color. Everything needed to be perfect this day because it was the day she had been waiting for. She marked it in red on her calendar with one word: Change! Yes, she said to herself, starting today, things are going to be different.

Ten year old Danielda had a freckled face and light brown eyes with reddish, shoulder-length hair when it actually hung down to her shoulders. Usually it stood out in all directions, refusing to stay brushed or orderly. She was tall for her age, which meant she stood out from the other girls in school the way a giraffe stands above a herd of zebras. Difficult to disappear in a crowd, she was an easy target for anyone to make fun of, which the kids at school did with relish, calling her names like shorty and fuzz head.

In spite of the fact that she often felt socially awkward, Danielda tried to be courteous and friendly to strangers, old people and, basically anyone who was nice to her. She usually got the highest marks in class and had perfect attendance. She would have been an ideal role model, except for one thing – her unfortunate reputation, something that Danielda called the curse.

She was, as her grandmother always said, a little accident-prone. The first time it happened, Danielda was a baby and her mother had dressed her in a cute little pink outfit to go to dinner with the family. Her grandfather was putting on her shoes, a pretty white pair with hard soles. He tickled her ribs and Danielda squealed, kicking her feet. The hard toe of the little shoe nailed her grandfather in his face, causing a bruise and a nosebleed. They were half an hour late for dinner