Book 1: The Crown Prince (The Kid Emperor of Occultoria), Page 3

  Chapter 1 - Strange Things Are Happening

  In a little suburb in Greater Vancouver, Canada, 12 year-old Max was sitting in English class, but it felt like he was having a nightmare. You see, his teacher, Ms. Hansen, was pointing to a sentence on the blackboard.

  “Please read this sentence aloud for us, Max,” she said. “And then tell me which words are the nouns.”

  Ms. Hansen was a lovely woman with short brown hair and clear maroon eyes. She was a nice teacher and Max liked her, but whenever she asked him to read a sentence aloud in class, he started to sweat.

  Max squinted at the blackboard.

  A silence followed.

  Everyone was staring at him.

  Max’s cheeks started to become red.

  He hated it when there was silence and everyone stared at him. It always made him feel so shy and self-conscious.

  He tried to concentrate on the sentence on the blackboard.

  The words were re-arranging themselves in a weird order and some words looked like others.

  The sentence was: ‘The man was being thrown out of the house.’

  But to Max, it looked like: ‘The man was peeing through the outhouse.’

  So he said, “The man was peeing through the outhouse.”

  The class erupted into incontrollable laughter.

  Max looked at his classmates. Some were looking at him and pointing at him. Others were avoiding looking at him.

  But they all had one thing in common: they were all laughing at him.

  Max’s heart beat quickly as his face became the color of a ripe tomato. He was so embarrassed he wanted to bury himself in the ground and never come out.

  It wasn’t his fault he was dyslexic. He had been diagnosed with that learning disorder when he was ten years old and it had been haunting him ever since.

  Ms. Hansen scowled at the class. “Boys and girls, that’s enough.”

  Another student pointed at Max’s overly large ears. “The big-eared rabbit can’t read.” Then, he said in a teasing singsong voice, “Big ears! Big ears!”

  Max was breathing hard now.

  The teacher looked at Max sympathetically.

  He had just transferred to Dr. F.D. Sinclair Elementary and he hadn’t had time to tell the teacher about his dyslexia yet. Of course, his oversized rabbit-like ears were an obvious and unusual trait,

  He just wanted to get away from there and go to his Safe Spot.