Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy) (F) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the tartan curtains with gold thread running through them, and the china ballerinas everywhere, it was quite comfortable in the kitchen of the strange apartment. Late summer rain was beating against the window, and the air was full of the comforting smell of vanilla and chocolate. Lottie had been baking our favorite cookies: vanilla crescents made to her grandmother’s recipe. Along with the vanilla crescents, we were drinking hot cocoa with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles on top. Lottie had also given us towels to rub our hair dry after the rain had drenched it. The full charge of loving care, butter, and sugar really did cheer us up for the time being. Lottie obviously felt sorrier for us than she liked to admit. Normally it was against her principles to bake Christmas cookies before December, and she was very strict about the traditional Christmas stuff. Too bad if anyone so much as hummed “Silent Night” in June. Lottie was having none of that. It brought bad luck, or so she said.
    For some time we were happy enough filling our faces with cookies and doing a running commentary on imaginary horse races: “Persephone Porter-Peregrin instantly takes the lead on the inside. She’s won almost all the derbies here at Ascot this year. She leaves her rival Vanilla Crescent behind her right away.… But what’s this? Daisy Dawn, starting number five, comes up to the front—this is thrilling—on the straight she’s neck and neck with Persephone and—yes! You wouldn’t believe it! The outsider Daisy Dawn wins by a nose!”
    “It’s not as if vanilla crescents were Christmas biscuits like gingerbread, strictly speaking,” Lottie was muttering in German, more to herself than us. Way back when she first came to us, Papa had insisted on a German au pair so that we’d learn to speak his mother tongue better. That was because when he spoke German to us himself, we were inclined to reply either not at all or in English (well, I was; at the time Mia couldn’t say anything except “dadadada”), and that was not his idea of a proper bilingual upbringing. As Lottie could speak hardly any English at all at that time, we always had to do our best to speak German to her, and Papa was delighted.
    “So you can eat them all the year round.” Lottie was still rather afraid that Baby Jesus might bear her a grudge over those vanilla crescents. “But only in exceptional cases, of course.”
    “We’re very, very exceptional cases,” Mia assured her. “Two kids in a one-parent family, no home and no hope, totally lost and strangers in this big city.”
    I’m afraid she wasn’t exaggerating all that much. We’d found our way home only with the help of some friendly passersby and a nice bus driver. As we didn’t remember the number of the building where we were to live for the time being, and all the buildings around here looked the same, we’d probably still have been wandering around in the pouring rain, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, if Buttercup hadn’t been standing at the first-floor window barking like crazy. Now the clever dog was lying on the corner bench in the kitchen with her head on my lap, hoping that a vanilla crescent would find its way into her mouth by some miraculous means.
    “It’s a fact—you two don’t have an easy time,” said Lottie, sighing deeply, and just for a moment I had a guilty conscience. To make Lottie feel better, we could have told her that it really hadn’t been too bad at school. Our first day at school in London had gone a lot better than, for instance, our first day in Berkeley, California, where a girl gang had threatened to force my head into the toilet. (It had only been threats on the first day; on the fifth day they actually did it. That was also the day when I signed up to learn kung fu.) Today’s first day hadn’t been at all like that or like various other memorable first days at assorted new schools. Apart from Persephone and Shaving Fun Ken, none of the