Chapter Text
To Matilda, the pages of a book are more familiar and recognizable than any classmate. She has friends, of course, playmates to trade marbles with, but there’s always a slight (albeit friendly) distance with them. "She knows all her times-tables" they tell their parents. "She reads books by people I’ve never heard of". A good friend, but an oddity for sure.
A book doesn’t have that complication for the small girl. Every page is another moment of a world she can join with no difficulty, and she doesn’t need to make eye contact or stop with her “loony twitching”, as her mother calls it.
She knows the stories aren’t real, of course (but oh, what a wonderful thing if they were!), and that there is no Tiny Tim, Guinevere, or Jean Valjean. But, she thinks, if there was, they’d probably understand everything.