Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

money?”
    â€œIt would just be a loan. I’d pay you back as soon as I start getting modeling jobs. They gave me an extra brochure. I’ll leave it.”
    â€œI may be a crazy old lady but I’m not that crazy.Besides, Miss Havisham didn’t give Pip the money. Sorry to spoil the book for you.”
    â€œI didn’t really think you would.” She drops the smile.
    â€œIt’s in July, this course?”
    â€œThey offer it four times during the summer. I’m going to see if I can get an after-school job and go to the last one.”
    â€œIt’ll have to be an after-school job robbing banks,” I say, and she does laugh — a small, polite, marshmallow laugh.
    Mrs. Gollywatchit pops her head suddenly through the door.
    â€œJean Barclay,” she booms, her transcontinental eyebrow doing a little dance. “You know that smoking is forbidden in this building. What an example! Put it out immediately.”
    â€œOh, my.” I extinguish the cigarillo against the ceramic gizmo on the reading table. “It slipped my mind. So many things to remember.”
    Tamara snorts.
    â€œYour class is getting ready to leave,” she says to Tamara, who has wheeled my walker into place.
    â€œIs this your last visit?” I ask her when the Gollything has gone.
    She shrugs. “I think we come again next week. MissWhipple’s scheduled an extra visit because a TV station wants to film us for some special they’re doing.”
    â€œMaybe you’ll be discovered.”
    â€œYou never know.” But there’s a touch of defeat in her voice.
    â€œDon’t forget your dragon.” She tucks it into the modeling brochure before we leave and slips them into my purse.
    Back in my room, I use them to replace the postcard I’ve been using as a bookmark in
A Tale of Two Cities
although, later, I fall asleep reading and my place is lost anyway. Miss Pross and Madame Defarge battling it out — how is it possible to fall asleep in the middle of that?
    Sometime in the night the book and the brochure have landed on the floor and Latoya is asking me where I want them put.
    â€œI’ll take them. I’m awake now with all this fuss.”
    â€œHow ‘bout a hot drink?” Latoya plumps the pillows. “You been sleeping since just after supper but I kept you a snack and a cuppa decaf from the nine o’clock snack wagon.”
    â€œJust the coffee. Now, where are my glasses?”
    It takes her half an hour to clean the glasses, heat the coffee and fill me in on what George the Acne Kid has been failing to learn at school and her husband has been confiscating at airport security.
    â€œYou wouldn’t believe the things people try to take onto a plane,” Latoya sighs. “Incredible. Things clipped onto rings where their body has been, well, you know...pierced. Nipples and even...”
    â€œLatoya!”
    â€œBut I let you read now,” she says finally. “Call me if you need anything.”
    The brochure, I notice, is filled with the kind of advertising gimmickry I always pointed out to students in my English classes. Skinnybones — such a willing victim. As if a five-day course could turn her into a cover girl for
Vogue
.
    And the expense. Such preposterous expectations. Twenty-five hundred dollars. Choose where you’d like to be parted from your money. Calgary...
    Or Vancouver?
    I look at the back of the brochure more closely.
    In August, Universal Style offers its course in Vancouver, Canada’s most beautiful city, on a campus located a short walk from the Pacific waterfront.
    August 6-10. August 13-17.
    Vancouver.
    Just three hours from Seattle.
    Serendipity is not something I’ve ever believed in.Alignments of the stars are fine enough in a piece of literature or high opera but in real life I’ve always believed we forge our own pathways. The horoscope page of the newspaper would be the first thing