Mai at the Predators' Ball Read Online Free PDF Page A

virgin until marriage, though she didn’t really know what it meant except that tonight she had lived a fairy tale with her father, pretty lies, all of it, and afterwards he’d smoked his cigarette, gone back inside to admire the charming little things, his own and others’, a private flower garden, who would all remember this night when each had offered the treasure of her heart to Daddy, when, Daddy, when are we going to sail to Panama Lou asked her father, in spring Ari replied, when the winds are gentler, now the boat was called Lou’s Boat, no longer Lou’s Camper , which would have been silly considering she was older now, and it was tied up at the Club Nautique as Ari polished its sides, listening to the sound of the waves while Rosie and Lou played on the bridge with greasy french-fry fingers the way she did at her mother Ingrid’s, brought up so badly he thought, and at times they darted down into the cabin with laughter spilling over, greasy french-fry fingers, and it annoyed him that she didn’t share his vegetarianism, eating their disgusting hot dogs, so make yourselves useful, help me polish the boat at least with all that grease of yours, if we want to make it to Panama she’s got to be watertight he told Rosie, who cast admiring looks at Lou, I’m the one who’s going to pilot just like Ari showed me, she knew by now how much it annoyed him to be called Ari and not Papa anymore, she’d heard it spat out and filled with ominous threat in her mother’s house, I’ll never speak to your father again, and you won’t be seeing him so often either, this won’t be , won’t be could only rankle coming from his daughter, who surely felt his exasperated stare, it’s Ingrid who talks that way, am I right, and Lou also called her mother by her first name, not Mama, speaking to both parents as though they were strangers, Ari, sad to see his daughter was no longer his or her mother’s, as though insolence were something to be prized now, all you are is old grownups, Ingrid and Ari, two old folks I wish I could do without, but I’m still growing so I’m stuck with you, I’ve just got to put up with it for now, oh yes she told an admiring Rosie, I’m the one who’s piloting us to Panama, because there won’t be , won’t be anyone in charge but me, Lou’s boat, is it true Rosie said, twice a week a bus comes for you and the other gifted girls, that’s what they call you, and why couldn’t I be one of you Rosie asked with anxious modesty, why, I mean I like drawing too and music, and they say you learn all kinds of things that we don’t in class, yes, well that’s because it’s only for us gifted kids Lou answered, but why not me too Rosie’s nervous little voice queried, not satisfied with the abrupt reply, only gifted, and you aren’t one, you’re still stuck in the middle of your reader, in fact you’re behind like those black kids on Esmeralda, the ones that really drag behind the others in school, and she knew full well this would offend her father as she went on whispering in Rosie’s ear, pulling her hair till she cried you’re pulling my hair out, then Lou calmed down, rejoicing in the sense of power that her exasperated dominance over the younger girl brought her, I mean she had to, didn’t she, lord over these little idiots with her all-knowingness, and besides they can retake the exams during the summer and so can you, thought Lou more kindly all of a sudden, after all you do have to get some people to like you, don’t you, and she felt her father’s gaze settle on her seeming to say be nice with Rosie, though her father wasn’t thinking of her, it was too vague and dreamy for that, Lou was more and more certain her father had another woman in his life, someone in my daddy’s life she thought, so often headed to New York, and he doesn’t want to tell me about her, he’d rather lie, what a sneak, as their gazes connected and wove into one another there in the bright afternoon