January 19, 1950

Morning sun rose slowly behind sheer clouds and Ivar found herself awake in snow.
It had snowed.
This wasn't any kind of typical snow, this was a blizzard snow. A thick white blanket of snow fell over the whole town and nobody was out either. Ivar was freezing and her skin felt more numb than ever. She hauled herself out from under the sandbags and tiptoed over to James Maisie's bakery door.
The lights were out and the only light was the faint gray that beamed in through the window. Ivar creaked open the door and a wave of warm air hit her face. She stepped through the tiny opening and the coldness on her feat seemed to fade away. Ivar gazed at the flask sitting on the hex-tiled countertop. She resisted the temptation to steal, but her body grew limp. Tiptoeing over to the counter, she grabbed the flask and hid it under her shirt. Good thing the flask was empty.
Ivar made her way back outside after grabbing a few slices of day-old bread and stale potato chips. She scanned the town; it was a gray life here in Starling. Ivar lumbered across the street and into an alleyway. The walls were rusted and stained, and a mural on the side of a bookstore was fading. When her feet took painful increments, her body shivered like it had never before. The soles of her feet were dull and the crunch of rough snow below her feet became a paralyzing uproar. Ivar eventually managed to make it through the alleyway and she came across a beautiful open land with hills and a lake that froze over. The plain had a lake that stretched over at least nine miles. The loose water was frozen still and the land that quenched for sunlight hid under thick pages of snow. A starling fluttered its wings blithely above the chilling shadows of winter,  and a sound only of wind was to be heard here.
Peacefulness.
She stood stoically when she was gazing at the land she stumbled upon. Amid the harsh and howling updraft and Ivar's thoughts that challenged the wind, she spotted a yellow cloud that swayed back and forth; it wasn't a difficult sight considering everything was white.
Curiosity is something that grows in the soil of young minds. Ivar gained the courage and walked to the edge of the lake. Every snow crunch beneath her foot felt like the most excruciating pain to her. When Ivar reached the frontier of the lake the yellow cloud stopped.
What seemed it be a cloud dwindled down to a coat with a person underneath. A young boy underneath a yellow jacket. His hair was like coal and his eyes were indigo like a July sky.
July
Oh, how Ivar missed July.
She remembered the sweet smell of tangerine that hung in the air on those humid summer days; how the stickiness of a lollipop drooped from her fingertips, and the feeling of her feet being refreshed from dipping them in the pond outside her home. The clouds let the sun shine and sometimes Ivar's mother would read, "Pat the Bunny" to her while they sat on a beach towel on top of their grassy hill. Her mother was beautiful; she had leather-like hair that swayed in the breeze summer yielded. Her mother's words were always soft and they rang familiar melodies sometimes. Times of rain and the melancholic days of summer brought the family together to play bored games underneath a faint incandescent hue brought by the homemade soy candles. To remember the days when blissfulness hung in the hair of their small home was like a memory no other. Ivar watched the boy for a little until he noticed her.
The first thing the boy noticed about this girl was her eyes; they were dark brown and squinty. He thought they were beautiful because he'd never seen eyes like hers before. Her skin was pale and white as snow— a little flush, though. Her hair was the texture of velvet and the color of a Raven. When Ivar smiled, her two front teeth bared a gap between them.
"Hi!" The boy grinned.
Sheepishly, Ivar looked down at her feet and her smile had dulled, "Hi."
The boy came from the frozen lake. He was a few inches taller than her and a little lanky. His cheeks were rosy and when he smiled they were align straight and ivory. 
"What's ya name?" The boy asked with curiosity gleaming in the center of his eyes.
"Ivar Darcy."
"Darcy?" The boy questioned.
"Yeah."
"Never heard that name 'fore."
"'Cause I'm not from around here. I ain't even in school." Ivar's lips parted and her pale skin quieted to a red dull.
"If ya were in school, ya'd know 'ain't' isn't even a word." Ivar looked down and fiddled with her fingers. She had never interacted with another person her age before; always been her mother and her siblings. That being; she'd never even talked to a boy before beside's her father— but he was a man.
"Where do ya live?"
Ivar inched her head up with a little cower hidden behind her eyes, "I lived up on a hill. Far from this town."
"Where's ya mom and dad?" The boy looked at her feet and noticed they had looked redder than a barn spotted in the greens of June.
"Why's ya feet got no shoes?" Ivar looked down at her feet and wondered the same thing. She has fled from her house without any shoes.
"Ya's cold?"
"Yeah," Ivar replied with a shyness that stowed her tongue.
"Come back to my house. My mom and dad are outta town 'till tonight. But the charwoman is here 'till five."
"Charwoman?" Ivar finally lifted her head so her eyes met the boy's.
"It's basically a cleaner for my house," The boy explained. Ivar swallowed and held back a laugh.
"When we'd need cleaning, me and my sister's would sweep ourselves. We never had someone help us."
"Why's ya not in school, Ivar?" Ivar's smile faded once again and her eyes were glued to the top of her feet, "I don't know,." She replied.
"Well, please come to my home," The boy started walking past her, "It ain't that far!"
"You said 'ain't'."
"Grammar rules are dumb," The boy began running through the snow, leaving his tiny footprints behind; which Ivar followed him by.