Falling In Read Online Free PDF Page A

proper education all these years, you’d know that.

11
    —and as she walked the path south toward Corrin, Isabelle pondered the notion again. She poked at it and played with it. A changeling! It would explain so much! Why she never understood the games other children played, could never get the hang of tag, flailed and flopped at kickball, never once scooped up a jack, then snatched the little red ball out of the air. Marbles skittered away from her. Jump ropes? No need to discuss.
    But Isabelle had other powers, or so she believed, powers normal children didn’t possess. She could make the second hand of a clock tick forward two tocks instead of one just by staring at it with her right eye, her left eye closed. Twice she’d made itsnow by crushing five ice cubes and laying their remains on her windowsill at night. Moreover, she was fairly certain she and a squirrel who lived in her yard were in cahoots. She whistled, the squirrel tilted his head and chattered back. This had happened three times. The squirrel looked as if he knew Isabelle from somewhere else, and maybe he did. From the Enchanted Forest, Isabelle thought, the Other World, or maybe the Land of the Elves—whatever faraway place she had originally come from.
    She looked into the trees, half expecting to see her squirrel looking back at her now, but there were no squirrels to be seen, at least not on this part of the path. A few birds chattered behind the bushes, and the creek muttered absentmindedly as it wound its way through the woods. Maybe, thought Isabelle, the squirrels were at lunch.
    A changeling. The daughter of a fairy, or maybe a troll, although Isabelle hoped not a troll. True, she had a bad temper, as trolls were known to, and she supposed a troll could have tired of her at an early age and traded her in for some other child, a sweeter,prettier girl. Still, she’d rather be the offspring of an elf. Authentic elves were beautiful, if a little bit on the silly side. Isabelle wasn’t beautiful, she knew, but maybe one day she would be. Sometimes her mother brushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “You never know, Izzy. You could really be something when you grow up,” her voice only half-doubtful.
    If Isabelle was a changeling and was now on a journey back to her true home, she wondered if another girl, the one stolen from the crib in her mom’s house and replaced by Isabelle—was right now making her way back to
her
true home. If so, Isabelle felt sorry for her.
    It wasn’t that her mother was so bad. She tried, but she’d had no training, and when Isabelle’s dad had left after her third birthday, Mrs. Bean (much to her dismay) had had to do duty as a single parent, feeling more clueless than ever.
    The fact was, Isabelle’s mom hadn’t known the simplest thing about making a home for a kid. She didn’t know that children need bright colors andhappy music, or that they should be read to every single day, fairy tales and folktales, funny books about trucks and silly books about cats wearing hats. From what Mrs. Bean had read in the newspapers, she assumed that television was the best way to keep a girl entertained, and so a gigantic, flat-screened monster of a TV was planted in the center of the living room, always on, always yakking away. Isabelle ignored it to the best of her ability.
    A quilt and a pair of flouncy curtains that hung over Isabelle’s window, both hand-me-downs from one of her mother’s coworkers, were the only splashes of color in an otherwise dreary house. “Someone has to teach you how to decorate, and no one ever taught me,” her mom said from time to time, apropos of nothing. She might be packing Isabelle’s lunch or polishing her reading glasses on the sleeve of her sweater. It was as if every so often Mrs. Bean found herself in the middle of an argument with an invisible critic. “I grew up in an orphanage, you know. I didn’t have a mother to tell me what sort of things to hang on the wall.”
    So