How to Talk to Girls at Parties (eBook Original) Read Online Free PDF

replace something alive, but I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They would have been baffled at my upset: after all, if my kitten had been killed, it had also been replaced. The damage had been made up.
    It all came back and even as it came back I knew it would not be for long: all the things I remembered, sitting on the green bench beside the little pond that Lettie Hempstock had once convinced me was an ocean.

II.
    I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
    Our house was large and many-roomed, which was good when they bought it and my father had money, not good later.
    My parents called me into their bedroom one afternoon, very formally. I thought I must have done something wrong and was there for a telling-off, but no: they told me only that they were no longer affluent, that we would all need to make sacrifices, and that what I would be sacrificing was my bedroom, the little room at the top of the stairs. I was sad: my bedroom had a tiny little yellow washbasin they had put in for me, just my size; the room was above the kitchen, and immediately up the stairs from the television room, so at night I could hear the comforting buzz of adult conversation coming from below, through my half-open door, and I did not feel alone. Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.
    Exiled to my little sister’s huge bedroom, I was not heartbroken. There were already three beds in there, and I took the bed by the window. I loved that I could climb out of that bedroom window onto the long brick balcony, that I could sleep with my window open and feel the wind and the rain on my face. But we argued, my sister and I, argued about everything. She liked to sleep with the door to the hall closed, and the immediate arguments about whether the bedroom door should be open or shut were summarily resolved by my mother writing a chart that hung on the back of the door, showing that alternate nights were mine or my sister’s. Each night I was content or I was terrified, depending on whether the door was open or closed.
    My former bedroom at the top of the stairs was let out, and a variety of people passed through it. I viewed them all with suspicion: they were sleeping in my bedroom, using my little yellow basin that was just the right size for me. There had been a fat Austrian lady who told us she could leave her head and walk around the ceiling; an architectural student from New Zealand; an American couple whom my mother, scandalized, made leave when she discovered they were not actually married; and, now, there was the opal miner.
    He was a South African, although he had made his money mining for opals in Australia. He gave my sister and me an opal each, a rough black rock with green-blue-red fire in it. My sister liked him for this, and treasured her opal stone. I could not forgive him for the death of my kitten.
    It was the first day of the spring holidays: three weeks of no school. I woke early, thrilled by the prospect of endless days to fill however I wished. I would read. I would explore.
    I pulled on my shorts, my T-shirt, my sandals. I went downstairs to the kitchen. My father was cooking, while my mother slept in. He was wearing his dressing gown over his pajamas. He often cooked breakfast on Saturdays. I said, “Dad! Where’s my comic?” He always bought me a copy of SMASH! before he drove home from work on Fridays, and I would read it on Saturday mornings.
    “In the back of the car. Do you want toast?”
    “Yes,” I said. “But not burnt.”
    My father did not like toasters. He toasted bread under the grill, and, usually, he burnt it.
    I went outside into the drive. I looked around. I went back into the house,