Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,124

to England. See all the stuff I’ve been reading about.”

This led toward my next avenue of inquiry, but I wanted to be thorough before I moved on.

“Tell me your favorite places that you’ve already been.”

“Hmm. I liked the Santa Monica Pier. My mom said Monterey was better, but we never did get that far up the coast. We mostly stayed in Arizona; we didn’t have a lot of time for travel and she didn’t want to waste all of it in the car. She liked to visit places that were supposed to be haunted—Jerome, the Domes, pretty much any ghost town. We never saw any ghosts, but she said that was my fault. I was too skeptical, I scared them all away.” She laughed again. “She loves the Ren Faire, we go to the one in Gold Canyon every year.… Well, I missed it this year, I guess. Once we saw the wild horses at the Salt River. That was cool.”

“Where’s the farthest place from home you’ve ever been?” I asked, starting to become a little concerned.

“Here, I guess,” she said. “Farthest north from Phoenix, anyway. Farthest east—Albuquerque, but I was so young then, I don’t remember. Farthest west would probably be the beach in La Push.”

She went suddenly quiet. I wondered if she was thinking of her last visit to La Push, and all that she had discovered there. We were in the cafeteria line at this point, and she quickly picked out what she wanted rather than waiting for me to buy one of everything. She was also swift to pay for herself.

“You’ve never left the country?” I persisted once we reached our empty table. Part of me wondered if my sitting here had made it off-limits forever.

“Not yet,” she said cheerfully.

Though she’d only had seventeen years to explore, I still felt surprised. And… guilty. She’d seen so little, experienced such a meager amount of what life had to offer. It was impossible that she could truly know what she wanted now.

“Gattaca,” she said, chewing a bite of apple with a thoughtful expression. She hadn’t noticed my sudden mood shift. “That was a good one. Have you seen it?”

“Yes. I liked it, too.”

“What’s your favorite movie?”

I shook my head and smiled. “It’s not your turn.”

“Seriously, I’m so boring. You must be out of questions.”

“It’s my day,” I reminded her. “And I’m not at all bored.”

She pursed her lips, as though she wanted to argue some more about my interest level, but then she smiled. I guessed she didn’t really believe me, but had decided she would be fair about it. This was my day to ask questions.

“Tell me about books.”

“You can’t make me choose a favorite,” she insisted almost fiercely.

“I won’t. Tell me everything you like.”

“Where do I start? Um, Little Women. That was the first big book I read. I still read it pretty much every year. Everything Austen, though I’m not a huge fan of Emma—”

Austen I already knew, having seen her battered anthology the day she read outside, but I wondered at the exclusion.

“Why not?”

“Ugh, she’s so full of herself.”

I grinned and she continued without prompting.

“Jane Eyre. I read that one pretty often, too. That’s my idea of a heroine. Everything by any Brontë. To Kill a Mockingbird, obviously. Fahrenheit 451. All of the Chronicles of Narnia, but especially The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Gone with the Wind. Douglas Adams and David Eddings and Orson Scott Card and Robin McKinley. Did I already say L. M. Montgomery?”

“I assumed as much from your travel hopes.”

She nodded, then looked conflicted. “Did you want more? I’m going on too much.”

“Yes,” I assured her. “I want more.”

“These aren’t in any kind of order,” she cautioned me. “My mom had a bunch of Zane Grey paperbacks. Some of them were pretty good. Shakespeare, mostly the comedies.” She grinned. “See, out of order. Um, everything by Agatha Christie. Anne McCaffrey’s dragon books… and speaking of great dragons, Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw. The Princess Bride, much better than the movie…” She tapped her finger against her lips. “There are a million more, but I’m blanking again.”

She looked a little stressed.

“That’s enough for now.” She’d done more exploring in fiction than in reality, and I was surprised she’d listed a book I’d not yet read—I would have to find a copy of Tooth and Claw.

I could see elements of the stories in her makeup—characters that had shaped the context of her world. There was a bit of Jane Eyre in her,