Girl at Sea Read Online Free PDF

followed her along.
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    “Who is we ?” Clio asked.
    “You’ll love them. This is your kind of crowd.”
    She seriously doubted that the “we” was “her kind of crowd.”
    She didn’t have a crowd. Or if she did, it was the crowd called normal human beings. And her name wasn’t kiddo. That was the newest annoying thing, just developed at his secret annoyance labs.
    “We have a table at one of the restaurants in the concourse.
    There’s just enough time for some dinner. Everyone is dying to meet you. They know all about you. From Naples, there’s a car to take us all to Sorrento, which is down the coast about an hour.
    Your backpack’s open.”
    Clio stopped to pull off her backpack before her dad reached it, only to find that she’d been tricked. He triumphantly grabbed the handle of the suitcase and raced ahead. Clio watched her precious pink luggage running ahead.
    “Gotcha!” her dad said over his shoulder.
    Clio looked at her large red watch. Four minutes. That’s how long it had taken for her to want to go home. Ollie, Ollie, save me! a frantic voice cried in her head. But there was no time to dwell on this, as her father was rushing ahead and rapidly slipping out of sight in the throng of travelers and picker-uppers and car drivers that flocked by the arrivals gate. He dipped into a restaurant with a front display made of Chianti bottles.
    “There they are,” he said.
    He nodded at a small table at the back. Three people sat there. Clio recognized one of them instantly. He was already standing up and coming over to greet her.
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    “Martin’s here?” she asked.
    Martin she could take. That was a good sign. Martin had been her father’s colleague back when her father worked for a software company as a writer. He was a short man, older than middle-aged, with a salt-and-pepper beard. He had never married or had any kids, so he spent his time doing whatever he liked.
    Martin also had two PhDs and had retired early, simply because he could.
    “Clio!” he said, hugging her. “You managed to get here.”
    “Just about,” Clio said. “You look a little different.”
    “I’ve lost weight,” he said. “All the swimming I’ve been doing.”
    The other two people were female, and they were strangers.
    They looked almost nothing alike, yet Clio could tell they were related. The younger of the two was a girl with very thick, long blond hair knotted at the top of her head. She had a full body, very curvy, in a Marilyn Monroe kind of way. She wore a deep blue tank top and tiny white shorts that showed off her apricoty tan. Her eyes were absolutely massive and sea blue, but her mouth was tiny. She was gorgeous and glowing. No makeup.
    Clio had the strange flash that this was what the person who invented cheese must have been like—a blond dairy goddess.
    Clio suddenly felt very overdressed in her jeans (thready though they were) and her oversized blue hooded sweatshirt, covered in stars and Japanese letter patches. She’d done that herself—cutting them out of old T-shirts and sewing them on by hand. Her clothes, ordinarily a source of pride, seemed out of place here. The sweatshirt had felt good on the cold plane, but now she was in Italy, where it was quite hot, even in the airport.
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    Taking it off would mean revealing the normally acceptable pink tank top she was wearing underneath. (Unfortunately, there had been a salad dressing incident when they hit an air pocket somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. She had cleaned herself up as best she could, but she was still just a little too ranch-dressingy for her own liking.)
    Off it went, though. Maybe no one would notice.
    Next to the cheese girl was a woman who wasn’t blond at all.
    Her hair was red and cropped short in a perfect pixie cut. She wore a snug one-piece black shirtdress that showed off her bone structure and a string of African beads around her neck, with a fairly alarming miniature mask set in the middle. It glowered at Clio when