Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,97
She wishes herself transported home, and consoles herself that she will have a night in a hotel room and a good breakfast in the morning and she will write a cheery postcard that she almost believes and then she will book passage back the way she came.
For some girls that might be the end of the adventure.
For some it might even be the right choice.
But Vida remains, as always, determined. She has come a great distance already.
On the island she had learned to be especially observant of the way waves break against rocks. She listens now to the sounds of the sea. She glances toward the end of the docks, wonders if there might be another little dock just around the outcropping. And so she goes on, takes the simple plank walkway that bends around the outcropping, and there she finds another cove with a smaller port, where the fishermen bring their boats in to avoid the big ships at the big port. The fishermen are hauling their nets, spreading their catch on the pier, shouting to each other in a language she can’t understand at all.
And then she sees him.
He’s sitting on a lone chair outside a simple restaurant, with a week-old American newspaper that he isn’t really reading folded up in his lap.
And he looks back, not surprised at all, and says, “How did you find me?”
“I remembered,” she says. “The story you told me about the island with the volcano.”
And he beams as though this were the sweetest thing a girl has ever done for him. “Will you sit?” he asks. “If you sit here, you’ll hear the locals shouting the most unbelievable profanities.”
So she sits, and undoes the buttons of her dress at the wrist. In a little while her hand and his find each other as they watch the fishermen go about their business and listen to their cursing so that the first words she comes to know in that foreign tongue are the ones a proper girl isn’t allowed to say. She puts the ferry schedule on the table between her and Sal, so that Sal knows it is there. The sun going down makes all the world look made of gold. Neither of them can stop smiling. Neither Vida nor Sal knows when they will leave, or where they will go, or what sort of people they will become, only that they will be traveling on to the next island together.
Acknowledgments
This book was mostly a smooth sail, and that’s all due to my wonderful editors. Thank you to the great Sara Shandler. Thank you to the brilliant Alice Jerman. Thanks to my friends at Alloy who have been marvelous collaborators for a long time now: Josh Bank, Joelle Hobeika, Hayley Wagreich, Romy Golan, Les Morgenstein, and the rest of the team. Thanks to Erica Sussman, Alexandra Rakaczki, Clare Vaughn, Christina MacDonald, and everyone at Harper. Thank you Joe Veltre and Tori Eskue and everyone at Gersh. Thanks to Adrienne Miller, Ryan Hawke, Hannah Tinti, Darin Strauss, Anne Heltzel, Jessie Gaynor for readerly and writerly support. Thanks to everyone I’ve learned from in teacher land: Julia Fierro, Michele Filgate, Alisson Wood, and Leah Johnson, among many other inspiring colleagues. And thank you to Marty McLoughlin—without you, none of it is possible.
About the Author
Photo by Maya Galbis
ANNA GODBERSEN is the New York Times bestselling author of the Luxe series and When We Caught Fire. She was born in Berkeley, California, and educated at Barnard College. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
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Books by Anna Godbersen
The Luxe
Rumors
Envy
Splendor
The Luxe Complete Collection
Bright Young Things
Beautiful Days
The Lucky Ones
When We Caught Fire
Beautiful Wild
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Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
BEAUTIFUL WILD. Copyright © 2020 by Alloy Entertainment and Anna Godbersen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover photographs © 2020 by Seth Mourra / Stocksy
Cover design by Jenna Stempel-Lobell
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020911615
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-267987-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267985-7
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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