The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel - By Sarah Addison Allen Page 0,6
tattered princess furniture. That’s when she remembered. She was in her mother’s old bedroom.
She’d never slept in a place that felt so hollow. Even though she knew her grandfather was downstairs, having the entire upstairs to herself made her uneasy. All night, there had been long periods of quiet punctuated by loud wooden pops of the house settling. And leaves kept rattling outside her balcony door. She’d finally turned on her MP3 player and tried to imagine herself someplace else. Someplace not so humid.
Scared or not, tonight she was going to have to sleep with the balcony doors open, or else perish into a puddle of perspiration. At some point last night, she’d kicked the bedsheet aside. And she’d started out in pajamas, but she’d wiggled out of the bottom part soon after turning in, and was now in only the top. Her mother might have been the most politically correct person on the planet—an activist, an environmentalist, a crusader for the underdog—but even she ran the air conditioner when it got too hot.
She made her way to the antiquated bathroom and took a bath because there was no shower. And she was momentarily stumped by the fact that there were separate faucets for hot and cold water instead of both coming out of the same faucet like in a normal bathroom.
Afterward she dressed in shorts and a racer-back tank, then went downstairs.
She noticed the note taped to the inside of the screen door right away.
Emily: This is Grandpa Vance writing you. I forgot to tell you that I go out for breakfast every morning. Didn’t want to wake you. I’ll bring you something back, but there’s also teenager food in the kitchen. The note was written in large block letters that slanted off the lines of the paper, as if he couldn’t see around his hand as he was writing.
She took a deep breath, still trying to rearrange her expectations. Her first day here, and he didn’t want to spend it with her.
Standing at the screen door, Emily heard a swish of leaves and, startled, looked up to see a woman in her thirties walking up the front porch steps. She had light brown hair that was cut into a beautiful swinging bob just below her ears. Emily could never get her own bobbed hair to look like that. She’d been trying to grow it out forever, and could only manage a short ponytail with it. And even then, it fell out of the tail and around her face most of the time.
The woman didn’t see Emily standing there until she reached the top step. She instantly smiled. “Hello! You must be Vance’s granddaughter,” she said as she came to a stop at the door. She had pretty, dark brown eyes.
“Yes, I’m Emily Benedict.”
“I’m Julia Winterson. I live over there.” She turned her head slightly, indicating the yellow and white house next door. That’s when Emily noticed the pink streak in Julia’s hair, tucked behind her ear. It wasn’t something she expected from someone so fresh-faced, in flour-stained jeans and a white peasant blouse. “I brought you an apple stack cake.” She opened the white box she was holding and showed Emily what looked like a stack of very large brown pancakes with some sort of filling in between each one. “It means …” she struggled with the word, then finally said, “welcome. I know Mullaby has its faults, as I’m sure your mother told you, but it’s also a town of great food. You’re going to eat very well while you’re here. At least there’s that.”
Emily couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an appetite for anything, much less food, but she didn’t tell Julia that. “My mother didn’t tell me anything about Mullaby,” Emily said, staring at the cake.
“Nothing?”
“No.”
Julia seemed shocked into silence.
“What?” Emily looked up from the cake.
“It’s nothing,” Julia said, shaking her head. She closed the lid on the box. “Do you want me to put this in the kitchen?”
“Sure. Come in,” Emily said as she opened the screen door for her.
As Julia walked in, she noticed the note from Grandpa Vance still on the screen. “Vance asked me to take him grocery shopping yesterday morning so he could get some things for you,” she said, nodding toward the note. “His idea of teenager food was Kool-Aid, fruit roll-ups, and gum. I convinced him to buy chips, bagels, and cereal, too.”
“That was nice of you,” Emily said. “To take him shopping, I mean.”