Starlings by Amanda Linsmeier EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Amanda Linsmeier
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Monster Fiction eBooks
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
She was supposed to be dead.
That’s the big lie I can’t make sense of, and the closer we get to finally
meeting her, the more nervous I become. I’ve traded a living father for a
dead grandmother, and I still can’t wrap my mind around it. But there’s no
time for that now.
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We’re almost there.
My mom taps her fingers on the steering wheel to an old song, our car
sagging with fatigue after delivering us from Callins, North Dakota, to the
big woods of northern Wisconsin, miles of trees as far as my eye can see.
Naked oak and birch and maple, pines standing proud and full, a dusting of
snow everywhere, the buttery-pink rays of early light streaming
through them.
It’s beautiful enough, but there’s still a part of me that wouldn’t want
Hawaii, not even Florence or Cairo. There’s a part that only wants home.
Wants to burrow under my bedcovers and escape reality in sleep.
Sometimes I want to sleep forever so I don’t have to remember.
Swallowing the loss, I reach over and trace the papers tucked inside the
door. A touchstone. The opening line to my dad’s last book, one he never
finished:
We went into the sapphire water with our pockets stuffed full of jewels.
It’s embarrassing how often I say it to myself. In my head, out loud,
under my breath. A good-luck charm, a mantra. An underlying question that
might haunt me forever.
Why did you leave us?
And for the last couple of weeks, another thing I can’t stop wondering:
Why did you lie?
Sick of the snowy landscape whirring by, I lean my head back and close
my eyes, thinking of stolen gems, and two ill-fated lovers on a ship, and a
pirate’s rough laugh, and all the ways my dad brightened my world. My
throat swells with the kind of pain that burns—sadness or rage, I sometimes
can’t tell which.
My thoughts take me to places I don’t want to go, so I give up on
thinking and open my novel to the page I dog-eared, glancing up to see a
road sign.
10
“We’re close.” My mom’s tone is light, but her shoulders are drawn up;
she’s escaping into herself. Anxiety is her shadow. I do what I can to help
ease it, including trying never to add to it. The drive was difficult on her,
but she only let me take over for a few hours. Despite the smile pulling at
her lips, when she looks at me, sadness is tucked away in her gaze. I have
her memorized: those eyes—the hazel of her irises, black pupils flowering
in the centers—those high cheekbones, the blue floral tattoo winding up her
forearm, her great laugh.
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