False Impressions Read Online Free PDF Page A

gelatinous-looking fruit—the lychee.
    I took a sip and moaned, “Shut the front door!”
    Madeline looked confused, so I explained. “It’s my way of saying ‘shut the fuck up.’ I’m trying desperately not to swear, but like my friend Maggie is fond of pointing out, I almost always end up saying the swearwords anyway.”
    Madeline laughed. “Have you ever tasted anything like this drink?”
    I took another sip. “No! It’s delicious.” I put it on the table to stop myself from guzzling it.
    Madeline and I started talking then, and the conversation flowed easily even though the topics we broached weren’t always so easy. We talked about what a shock it had all been for her—finding out about the thefts, the forgeries, how she thought she might still be a bit in shock. She spoke about seeing the comments on her website.
    Whenever there was a lull in the conversation, Madeline didn’t seem to view it as something to fill. In fact, I’m not sure she knew what a “lull” was. Instead, she glanced around the club, serene, a small smile on her face, the sight clearly bringing her enjoyment. I made a few stabs at conversation during these times, but unless we stumbled onto something that made her eyes light up, Madeline had little taste for trivial conversation. Unlike most Chicagoans, she couldn’t even be drawn into a discussion about the weather.
    “It is cold,” she acknowledged when I tried, then said nothing further.
    In her serenity, I found calm, too; it made me look around and just… notice.
    The next time I spoke, I chose my words carefully. “I’m really glad to have met you, Madeline.”
    She looked at me, her face breaking from enjoyment to joy. “You, too, Isabel. You, too.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
    “It’s funny,” I said. “Because I’ve heard about you from Mayburn.”
    Madeline looked at me in sort of a curious way. “You call him by his last name.”
    “Yeah. Always have.”
    She gave a little laugh. “Mayburn. It seems such a tough name for him.”
    “Well,” I said, shrugging, “Mayburn is a tough guy. As far as I know.”
    But Madeline didn’t seem to share my assessment. “John is a sweetheart,” was all she said.
    I blinked a few times. “ Sweetheart sounds like a brother/sister relationship.”
    She nodded. “That’s what it became.”
    I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows. I knew that Mayburn viewed Madeline as a great love of his life, second only to Lucy.
    She seemed to read my look. “That’s what it became…for me,” she said, clarifying.
    “Why is that?”
    “In part because I’m an only child. I was adopted.”
    “When you were a baby?”
    “Yes. My parents are blonds from Wisconsin.” She smiled as she thought of them. “But my dad did a lot of work in Japan. That’s where they adopted me from.”
    “Do you know your birth family?”
    She shook her head. “They did give me a gift once.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
    “How long did you and Mayburn date?” I asked. “Years?”
    “Six months,” Madeline said.
    “Is that it?” Mayburn had made it seem longer, or maybe it was the way he remembered it, the way he gave it import.
    Suddenly it dawned on me that the people I considered of great importance in my life—Theo, Sam—might not think of me the same way.
    Sam, for example, I hadn’t seen or spoken to in months. For all I knew, he was once again with Alyssa, his ex-high school girlfriend. Maybe Sam felt, now, that I was a swerve, something he’d veered around before getting back to his first love.
    And Theo—we’d dated about the same amount of time as Mayburn and Madeline. Right now, he’d told me, he simply couldn’t be in a relationship. Theo, an only child, had been close with his parents. But recently, some disturbing events had Theo questioning not only himself but everyone around him. I understood such issues well. I understood that Theo needed to hide to lick his