Marooned in Manhattan Read Online Free PDF

disgusted when he discovered that I didn’t make my bed. One morning, he told me, ‘It’s not fair of you to expect Eurdes to do it for you.’
    That surprised me and hurt my feelings because I didn’t remotely expect Eurdes to make my bed. I didn’t expect anyone to do it. But I started making my own bed and I have to admit Scott was right because, strangely, it’s a lot nicer to get into a bed that is already made.

Chapter 5
    J oanna’s best friend is Rachel. She’s from Boston but went to a famous college for women in New York, called Sarah Lawrence. I think they let men go there now. Rachel is the manager and part owner of a tiny art gallery on the Upper East Side. Joanna took me there to visit and Rachel gave us a tour of the paintings, which she called artworks. They were not interesting at all. I like pictures with people or animals or stormy seas with little boats or colourful strange shapes and splotches. The pictures in the gallery were of very tame fields and valleys, painted in neutral colours of muted browns and olive greens. I had to turn my head away so Rachel wouldn’t see me suppressing a yawn.
    After the tour, Rachel brought us to her little office upstairs for some drinks. She and Joanna drank a bottle of Prosecco between them and I had real iced tea with mint and lemon. Rachel is single and has a daughter, Kylie, who is four months older than me. Kylie arrived while I was still drinking my first iced tea and she swept me away with her downstairs to the basement. This was being used as a storage area for dozens of canvases in all shapes and sizes, which werestacked up against the walls. We sat on some packing crates. I felt a little shy so Kylie did most of the talking.
    She was adopted from the province of Guangdong in China when she was two and a half years old, but she can’t remember living in China or meeting her mom, Rachel, for the first time or the flight to America. Nor can she speak a word of Mandarin, but she intends to learn. She is extraordinarily pretty, with delicate features and black hair with a streak of pink on the left side near the front, and black eyes with thin, arched eyebrows. She has a short, choppy fringe, which she called
bangs
. When she smiles, she looks like someone has just told her an amazing secret. She is slender and graceful and even though she is much taller than me, her feet are about two sizes smaller. She has the most beautiful, gurgling, musical laugh I have ever heard.
    She nearly had a brother last year. She doesn’t know his real name so she and her mom called him Luca. He was being adopted from India and he was supposed to be six or seven years old. She and her mom had plane tickets to go to India to collect him, but a couple of weeks before the trip, the Indian authorities told them that medical tests on his wrists showed that Luca was in fact thirteen years old but so malnourished that he looked much younger. The Indian government doesn’t allow children over twelve to be adopted.
    ‘That’s terrible,’ I said. ‘Poor Luca.’
    ‘I know,’ Kylie replied solemnly. ‘When I’m eighteen I’m going to travel to India and try to find him.’
    ‘You can come with me if you want,’ she added and she also invited me to her apartment the next day.
    Scott and Leela dropped me off the following morning on their way to New Jersey for a birthday lunch for Leela’s mother. I was very impressed with Kylie’s bedroom. She owns more clothes than all of the girls in my old class in Dublin put together. Her bedroom is painted purple and orange, and almost everything in it is purple and orange because those are her favourite colours, but if she were forced to choose between them to save her life, she would choose purple. Nina, the babysitter, gave us little plastic pots of baby carrots with hummus and glasses of cranberry-grape juice. We spent most of the morning playing dancing on Wii. Kylie is a much better dancer than I am and I’m not being modest.