Reinventing Mona Read Online Free PDF

through papery skin. But they moved like a pianist, quick and soulful. When her long nails separated sections of my hair and she combed through it with her fingers, I almost curled up like a cat and went back to sleep.
    “Will you tickle my arm when you’re done?” I begged. Francesca agreed, but we never made it that far. Two hours later, as she was wrapping colored thread around the last of my hundred or so braids, the phone rang with the news.
    “Hold on a sec,” Francesca said when she heard the phone rang. We had no idea that was the last minute of life as we knew it. “In a second,” she reprimanded the phone for ringing a third time. “Hello. Francesca’s House of Beauty,” she lilted, expecting it to be my parents.
    After a moment of silence, she said, “It sure is,” equally chipper. Francesca then fell silent as she listened to the caller. She dropped her full weight onto the chair under her and she cupped her forehead with her palm. Tension flooded the room as tangibly as if it were water rushing through a broken dam into our kitchen. Francesca kept glancing at me, then returning her attention to the caller. She sighed a deep, painful exhaust and rushed the caller to the bottom line. When people have to break bad news to someone, the preamble is a futile attempt to pad the fall. She was undoubtedly listening to the details of the crash. Our painted blue school bus slid on a sheet of ice, I later learned. It had a head-on collision with a truck and fell off a cliff. “So tell me,” Francesca interrupted. “Was anyone seriously injured?” She paused again and tears fell from her eyes. She was silent for a few seconds, then exploded into tears.
    “What happened?” I asked, though I already knew the accident must have been very serious.
    Francesca inhaled deeply to regain some composure and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “Mona, I don’t know how to tell you this,” she started.
    “Is everyone okay?” I asked. It was odd. Even though I knew that everyone was definitely not okay, I felt that the question provided a last grasp at not knowing. At the tragedy not being real.
    Francesca shook her head, scrunching her face with pain.
    “Are they at the hospital?” I begged urgently. With each question, my hopes for a happy ending were skidding downward.
    Her head shaking was then accompanied by more sobbing.
    “Did someone die?” I asked meekly.
    “They all did, Mona.” She began sobbing again and held her arms out for me to hug her. I was immobilized by shock and half held on to the notion that if we didn’t move, didn’t cry or acknowledge the fatal crash, that we could halt the progress of time and perhaps even rewind it.
    “Maybe it wasn’t them,” I offered. “Maybe it was another school bus.” Another blue school bus with tie-dyed curtains and peace signs painted on the windows.
    I remember trying to hold as still as possible, desperately clinging to the hope that if we just stayed absolutely motionless, we could navigate our way out of this. With every tear that fell from Francesca’s eyes, it became clear that the phone call apologizing for the mix-up was never going to come. Still, I stood frozen, feeling a pulse in my ears and nothing else. I know Grammy came to get me because she told me so, but for the life of me I can’t remember even leaving Montana. In my mind, Francesca is still sitting in that same chair and has been grieving for fifteen years.

Chapter 5
    A week later I stared at a pink lace canopy over my queen-sized bed at Grammy’s house. Except I couldn’t call it Grammy’s house anymore. It was my home, too, now. Just she and I living together in slightly less square footage than the commune, on an island with roads that had never been touched by ice. My new home was on Ocean Drive in a brick estate with seashell pink trim and gold accents. A gate with our family crest and an intercom separated us from the tourists who drove down our block to gawk at homes.