Once upon a time, there was a girl named Ava. Ava was a special girl, or so she liked to think. When this girl was little, she would make up the most fantastical of tales and show them to their parents who never failed to encouraged her creativity.

"You are special," they said. "You can grow up to do anything."

And so Ava grew up realizing she was pretty awesome, and couldn't wait to conquer the world with her imagination.

At age eight, she found out she could walk to the library from her house, and became friends with the librarians as well as all the fictional people and creatures she met. This is when she began writing down her ideas.

At thirteen she found a writing program and started putting structure to the tangled web of ideas her mind was. So many possibilities, would she be a spy? Witch? Time-travel expert?

At fifteen she had so many books, so many fictional companions, the few real friends she met just went to school and talked about things other than books, and she didn't really know how to deal with that. So Ava drifted apart from them and closer to her papery companions.

She could do anything.

But this poor disillusioned girl failed to realize one thing. Most every parent called their child special. This should mean that most children are indeed special, should it not?

But no, this is not a happy tale. And it's also not a fictional fantasy.

Children grow up. And not all of them are special. Or so Ava was starting to think.

Real life isn't like a book. But she tried. Very hard. To make it so.

At age sixteen she got her first job and met some more not fictional people. Ava didn't think these people were as nice. But they were still people. And conversations didn't always end up the same way, like in one of her books.

It was hard for Ava to adjust. And by this time, she hardly wrote anymore, feeling nothing in her life was exciting enough to write about. She kept her typewriter, quill pen, and laptop at the ready though, for when something exciting would happen, because it had to come eventually.

At age eighteen, now the few not fictional friends Ava created, went off to college, met more not fictional people, and saw Ava a day or so every school break. Ava never wanted to go to college, she always imagined a dark and mysterious boarding school would be more her scene. But this kind of school isn't overly popular in the 21st century in the mid-west. Most people there probably had to be reminded what a boarding school was.

The unfortunate thing about Ava is, she waited. A lot. As a quiet unobtrusive fictional world inhabitant, she wasn't one to go DO something. She was waiting for all the exciting things to just happen to her. After all, that is exactly what happened in all the books she read. The protagonist, a word she learned in her writing program years ago, was always just going about their daily life, when BAM, something happened to them. Ava read a lot of fantasy. Usually involving dragons.

So at age nineteen, having done the Grand Tour the summer before (thinking maybe THIS would be the start of my story), and even though Ava had a great time, her inciting incident was still to come. She could feel it. Every day. Something had to happen. All summer, no handsome stranger had befriended her, she hadn't ended up in haunted lodgings…she rode on a lot of trains, and read a lot.

Please, thought Ava every day. Where's my dragon? I'm now too old for boarding school. And everybody is now hounding me to actually grow UP and realize life isn't a book.

But oh, she wanted it to be.

Ava even thought up a narrator.

This narrator was with Ava at every moment in her life.

"Would you like one scoop or two?" Ava said, trying to sound cheerful.

Ava's job was at an ice cream shop, you see. Not as an undercover spy looking out for a madman with a weakness for mint and Oreo's, unfortunately. Just worked there for the paycheck.

And while she helped this not fictional person with their ice cream, the narrator would be describing the scene in as much detail as possible, to Ava's annoyance. And it would be much more interesting than what was really happening.

Every day Ava went through her doldrums routine. Waiting. Feeling she was special. Or could be anyway. But these things and feelings are hard to explain to people when you're not eight anymore, but more than a decade older.

Ava was starting to fear (but at the same time hope, of course) that maybe she WAS a character in a book. Albeit a side character. Underdeveloped, not in the sequels, maybe a lame sidekick that the fans didn't end up liking, but had so much potential.

Or maybe she was in the prologue still, all those introductions in books people really don't read, but skip over or skim.

She was already nineteen, usually people's stories have started by then, right? Sure she's traveled abroad, lived the lives of almost a thousand fictional characters.

Ava had hardly lived herself though. She was scared. People in real life weren't summed up in a page. It wasn't obvious if this next person walking into the ice cream store was in the first chapter, about to kick start her story, or an extra in a crowd of people streamlining in for their mint and Oreos. One could never tell, and it made her scared.

Maybe she had missed her cue. Wouldn't that suck. She'd have to live her life with no plot, because she missed a damn cue.

"Ava."

Ava usually didn't respond the first time someone started talking to her. She was deep in her own head, discovering special powers, or theorizing the afterlife. A library, that's what her own theory wa—

"Ava." Tap tap.

I jumped, almost dropping the empty ice cream pan I was washing. I blinked, looking around. I was at work. Yes. Very much alive, and very much non fictional. (as far as one can tell.) Oh, and someone was saying my name.

What would be the correct response? Yes? What? Are YOU an undercover agent who's been watching my ice cream making skills these past years and am now recruiting me to be a spy?

No, it was Ava's older sister. A very nonfictional, no possible way interesting, older sister.