Beggars in Spain Read Online Free PDF Page A

Nothing else matters.”
    “I don’t understand, Daddy.”
    “You will. Someday.”
    “But I want to understand now ,” Leisha said, and Daddy laughed with pure delight and hugged her. The hug felt good, but Leisha still wanted to understand.
    “When you make money, is that your indiv…that thing?”
    “Yes,” Daddy said happily.
    “Then nobody else can make money? Like only that tree can make that flower?”
    “Nobody else can make it just the way I do.”
    “What do you do with the money?”
    “I buy things for you. This house, your dresses, Mamselle to teach you, the car to ride in.”
    “What does the tree do with the flower?”
    “Glories in it,” Daddy said, which made no sense. “Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort. And that’s all that counts.”
    “I’m cold, Daddy.”
    “Then I better bring you back to Mamselle.”
    Leisha didn’t move. She touched the flower with one finger. “I want to sleep, Daddy.”
    “No, you don’t, sweetheart. Sleep is just lost time, wasted life. It’s a little death.”
    “Alice sleeps.”
    “Alice isn’t like you.”
    “Alice isn’t special?”
    “No. You are.”
    “Why didn’t you make Alice special, too?”
    “Alice made herself. I didn’t have a chance to make her special.”
    The whole thing was too hard. Leisha stopped stroking the flower and slipped off Daddy’s lap. He smiled at her. “My little questioner. When you grow up, you’ll find your own excellence, and it will be a new order, a specialness the world hasn’t ever seen before. You might even be like Kenzo Yagai. He made the Yagai generator that powers the world.”
    “Daddy, you look funny wrapped in the flower plastic.” Leisha laughed. Daddy did, too. But then she said, “When I grow up, I’ll make my specialness find a way to make Alice special, too,” and Daddy stopped laughing.
    He took her back to Mamselle, who taught her to write her name, which was so exciting she forgot about the puzzling talk with Daddy. There were six letters, all different, and together they were her name . Leisha wrote it over and over, laughing, and Mamselle laughed too. But later, in the morning, Leisha thought again about the talk with Daddy. She thought of it often, turning the unfamiliar words over and over in her mind like small hard stones, but the part she thought about most wasn’t a word. It was the frown on Daddy’s face when she told him she would use her specialness to make Alice special, too.
     
    Every week Dr. Melling came to see Leisha and Alice, sometimes alone, sometimes with other people. Leisha and Alice both liked Dr. Melling, who laughed a lot and whose eyes were bright and warm. Often Daddywas there, too. Dr. Melling played games with them, first with Alice and Leisha separately and then together. She took their pictures and weighed them. She made them lie down on a table and stuck little metal things to their temples, which sounded scary but wasn’t because there were so many machines to watch, all making interesting noises, while they were lying there. Dr. Melling was as good at answering questions as Daddy. Once Leisha said, “Is Dr. Melling a special person? Like Kenzo Yagai?” And Daddy laughed and glanced at Dr. Melling and said, “Oh, yes, indeed.”
    When Leisha was five she and Alice started school. Daddy’s driver took them every day into Chicago. They were in different rooms, which disappointed Leisha. The kids in Leisha’s room were all older. But from the first day she adored school, with its fascinating science equipment and electronic drawers full of math puzzlers and other children to find countries on the map with. In half a year she had been moved to yet a different room, where the kids were still older, but they were nonetheless nice to her. Leisha started to learn Japanese. She loved drawing the beautiful characters on thick white paper. “The Sauley School was a good choice,” Daddy said.
    But Alice