Surviving Valencia Read Online Free PDF Page B

knowing about it. It was how my own mother had survived the holidays for as long as I could remember, a warm rag on her forehead while my grandma served the food.
    The girls glared at me but gathered up the Barbies and outfits around them and left. I locked my door and smoothed the bedspread where they had wrinkled it. I closed my dresser drawers and carefully peeled the stickers off the back of my chair. Outside, a volleyball game was in action. Valencia and Van’s friends were everywhere, filling picnic tables we had borrowed from neighbors, stretched out in lawn chairs and hanging around by the barbeque grill. My aunts and uncles drank wine coolers and talked with the other adults.
    I pushed aside my line of Trixie Belden books on my windowsill and kneeled on the carpet with my chin propped in my hands, watching as a brown station wagon slowly made its approach. Uh oh. It was Jenny’s mom’s car. The last thing I needed was for my mom to notice and come looking for me to see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have worried. The car pulled up along the curb and Jenny and Heather ran out to it and jumped in. In a moment they were gone and the party went on as if nothing had happened. Then I was hit by a new worry: Had they opened all the makeup? I needed to get to it before these little neighbor girls went downstairs and found it. I cracked open my bedroom door and saw that they were now down the hall on my parents’ bed playing with the Barbies. Ha!
    I raced downstairs to the little bathroom off the T.V. room and there I found all my new makeup, out of its packaging and much too destroyed for the damage to have been accidental. I made a little hammock with the front of my shirt and slid the smeared and broken cosmetics into the sling. Back upstairs, back to my room I went, finding that it thankfully was still vacant. I closed and re-locked the door. Then I opened the drawer of my bedside table and plunked my birthday gifts inside, slamming it shut so I wouldn’t have to look at them.
    That was the first day of being eleven. Eleven turned out to be a very hard year.

Chapter 9
     
    Because of the photos, I was a little uncomfortable with Alexa staying at our house. They were still hidden in the book, and in no way did I think she would have any interest in a “Shabby Chic” decorating book, but I was afraid of what might happen if something else showed up. Because things had been happening.
    A few weeks ago on a Saturday, Adrian and I were coming home from a trip to the coffee shop just as the mail was arriving. I saw the letter – it looked just like the other one from what I could catch in that quick glance -- and my stomach tightened up. We were both wearing sunglasses so at least he could not see the way my eyes shot open. He shuffled through the mail and swiftly tucked that familiar envelope with its typed address into one of his art magazines. Then he handed me a clothing catalog and a postcard from his parents.
    “Look. They’re in Delaware,” he scoffed. I guess the joke was, Who would send a postcard from a place like Delaware? He was just trying to be distracting. So this meant he had intersected one or more of these letters already. I suppose I shouldn’t say intersected; after all, it was his mail. But if he had never seen one before and did not know what to expect, he simply would have torn it open. So that one slippery move said quite a bit. And there was something else I learned too: He was far smoother than I realized. There was no hint of discomfort or fear about him. He slid the letter into his magazine, passed me the postcard, cracked a joke, unlocked the front door with our going-for-a-walk key. He didn’t miss a beat, didn’t crack a sweat, all aspects of his behavior a choreographed dance of benign casualness.
    That was my chance to confront him but I didn’t take it. In fact, I even made things easy for him. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, leaving him there to do what he would like