Anastasia Again! Read Online Free PDF

and a half years old. I'm looking for the pictures. Why doesn't this book have pictures?"
    "I don't know. Probably pictures hadn't been invented yet, when it was written. Come on, Sam. Let me change your diaper. We have to go look at a house."
    "Booorrrring," said Sam cheerfully.
    "You're right:
boring.
Hey, listen Sam. Do you want to have a plot?"
    "Okay."
    "Well, you cry when you see the house, okay? Cry a whole lot, and say you hate it. Say you're
allergic
to it. Say it makes your eyes hurt, or something."
    "Okay," said Sam cheerfully. He practiced a fake whimper.
    "Yeah, that's pretty good," said Anastasia as she changed his diaper and buttoned him into a clean sunsuit. "Just keep doing that when you see the house. Maybe you can make real tears."
    ***
    The real estate lady had bleached hair and a gross car with push-button windows. Sam fooled with the button on his window and mashed his fingers and began to cry.
    "Not yet, Sam," muttered Anastasia. "Save it."
    "I think you'll adore this house," said the real estate lady in a fake voice. "Good neighborhood, too. Wonderful schools. What grade did you say you were in, Anastasia?"
    "I'll be in seventh."
    "Oh, goodness, I thought you were older. Maybe because you're so tall for your age."
    Terrific. Didn't anybody ever tell her how rude it is to mention somebody's
flaws,
for pete's sake? Was she going to mention her father's baldness next?
    No. She was going to talk about the roof and the furnace. Wonderful old slate roof, needs no maintenance at all, lasts forever; wonderful brand new furnace, just put in last year, hardly uses any oil, blah blah blah. Anastasia could hardly believe that her mother had been through this twelve times already. She tried to think of the most boring thing she had ever done; going to an organ concert at the Catholic church with Jenny MacCauley's family came to her mind. She had almost fallen asleep. She imagined doing it twelve times. No way.
    And this was just as boring, maybe even more so. Now the lady was babbling about the plumbing, the wonderful copper pipes, the woodwork, the wonderful woodwork, the interest rates, the wonderful interest rates.
    Anastasia's interest rate in this conversation was zero percent. She leaned back on the gross plastic seat of the gross car and gazed through the window.
    The trees and lawns were nice. It was sure a lot greener than Cambridge.
    "Look, Sam," she said, and pointed. Some kids in bathing suits were running through a sprinkler in a yard.
    Sam looked. "I would like that," he said thoughtfully.
    "Yeah, because you like being wet, dummy," Anastasia said pointedly.
    Anastasia was beginning to feel very odd. At first she thought maybe she was carsick. Then she realized what it was. It was because she liked what she was seeing through the windows of the car. She liked the trees and the lawns and the flowers. She liked the idea of running through a sprinkler, even with dumb Sam. She liked it that there were dogs and kids and bikes and a kind of nice-smelling quiet out here, wherever they were. But to like those things meant moving, and she loved Cambridge and the apartment. So there was a war going on in her stomach.
    "Well, kiddos," said the real estate lady in her Barbie Doll voice, as she turned a corner, "here we are. This is it!"
    Sam dutifully burst into fake tears. "I'm allergic to it!" he wailed.
    Anastasia didn't even hear him. She was looking at the house, and her stomach felt as if she had been kicked by someone wearing cowboy boots. Her mother had once told her that it was painful to fall in love, and now, suddenly, she knew what that meant. She had expected to feel it for the first time when she fell in love with a
boy,
for pete's sake. But now she was feeling it—the pain in her stomach, her heart beating funny, Mantovani violin music in her ears, and aching behind her eyes as she tried
not to cry—because she was falling in love with a
house.
    It was because the house had a tower.
    ***
    And it