Camila Morales was by all accounts, perfectly normal. She ate breakfast every morning, walked to school every day and went to sleep every night. A thoroughly ordinary person… but sometimes under unusual circumstances ordinary people live extraordinary lives. Camila’s extraordinary life started on her seventh birthday. Her aunt had gifted her a sketchbook that she found in a vintage store. Drawing was one of the only things that Camilla was exceptional at, she had loved the present at first sight. It was quite a common-looking book; long, dark blue, with intricate designs of flowers and vines covering half its cover and the rest left blank, as if for the owner to complete. But looks are deceiving and the sketchbook was about to completely change Camila’s life.
The first time she opened the book, it had seemed blank. But then she noticed a sentence written at the top of the first page. ‘Let me paint you a picture…’ it said in a looping golden script. A chill had gone up Camila’s spine, but she’d ignored it, which was her first mistake. When she next opened the book, the page was no longer blank. It showed, under the golden words, in an art style exactly like hers, a drawing. It was a picture of her father standing at the open door of their house holding a small black kitten. Camila had been bewildered and a little frightened and she had hidden the book at the back of her cupboard. But what happened an hour later was even stranger. She had been in the dining room eating her dinner when the door of the apartment opened and her father stepped in. This in itself, was nothing out of the ordinary, but what made Camila gape was the small creature cradled in her father’s arms. A little black kitten!
From then on everything changed. Camila had taken the notebook out of her cupboard and kept it gingerly on her bedside table, unwilling to open it but unable to forget. She had finally lost that battle with herself and, when she opened it after a few days, the picture of her father had disappeared, replaced with a new sketch. A drawing of her brother, Carlos, at the stove, his face twisted in agony as a pot of hot soup fell over and scalded his arm. Camila had stared at the drawing in alarm, her blood running cold at the thought of her brother burning himself. She had steeled herself and done the only thing she could think of, which was to pick up her pencil and draw a new picture on the next page. She had drawn the same scene, her brother in the kitchen before the stove, except she inserted herself into the sketch, pulling her brother away from the counter before the boiling soup fell on him. When she was done, she turned the page only to find the original picture had disappeared from the book. She didn’t know what it meant, but hoped that somehow, she had saved her brother from getting hurt.
The events of the drawing started to unfold the next day, but Camila didn’t immediately realise this. Her grandmother had a sore throat and so her brother had offered to make some hot pepper soup for her, but when it was cooking, Carlos accidentally jostled the stove, toppling over the soup. It was only when Camila quickly pulled him out of the way by his sleeve that she realised what had happened. She had the power to dictate the future sitting innocently at her bedside table. It seemed magical and quite perfect at first! But as the years passed, Camila started finding the book terrible. She could never enjoy beautiful moments or get amazed by pleasant surprises because she had seen them happening before. It was as if she had read the story of her life before she had a chance to live it! She had tried before to get rid of the book but could never bring herself to do that. She kept feeling like she would regret it later. ‘If I throw it away and anything bad happens to my family, it would feel like my fault.’ she thought.
And so she kept it, redrawing all the bad scenes it showed her and leaving the pleasant ones as they were. She saw the sketch of her mother breaking her high heels and tripping and immediately changed it so that her mother left the house wearing platform sandals. She knew what she was going to get for Christmas before she could unwrap her present to find the video games there. She felt like she was cheating life and wished she could stop, wished she could find it in herself to get rid of the book, but she couldn’t.
Then on her fifteenth birthday, Camila’s life changed again. She was up early. It was a sunny, cheerful morning, but she wasn’t feeling happy. She turned immediately and picked the book from the bedside table as she had every morning for the last eight years. As she flipped it open, the words that greeted her were familiar; ‘Let me paint you a picture.’ but the picture... The picture made her stare in disbelief. For a while she couldn’t move, but when she finally stirred, it wasn’t to reach for her pencil. Camila left the book where it was and walked out of the door to where her family was waiting to wish her. She laughed and ate and unwrapped her presents and felt content again for the first time in years. She only returned to her room hours later and reached for the book out of habit, but there was nothing there. She felt a moment of panic, but it faded, leaving behind a feeling of immense relief.
Her mind went back to the last picture she had seen in the book. It was her, sitting on the bed in her room and drawing. What had shaken her though, was that the book she was sketching in was a large, plain book, with no designs. Clearly, her old book was a thing of the past. Camila smiled and pulled her new sketchbook out of the box her mother had gifted it to her in. Her new life was just beginning, and for once she felt no urge to put pen to paper.
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