Tales From My Closet Read Online Free PDF

over my shoulders, and whispered: “For you. To take home to America. You will wear this at NYU so you do not get wet. Non? ”
    “But what will you wear?” I said.
    “That is why you must promise me that you’ll return it to me in person.”
    “I promise,” I said as he leaned into me for a kiss.

     
    When I got back to New Jersey, my French was really good and my entire sense of myself had changed. For one thing, I realized that I could never, ever tell my mother anything personal again, because if she ever found out about Arnaud? I could just see her next book: When Your Teen’s First Romance Ties Her in Tangles: The Daughter Doctor’s Guide to Unraveling the Knots. I hung Arnaud’s raincoat in my own closet — not in the coat closet downstairs, where anyone, such as my brat brother, might take it. I took my Hermès scarf out of my suitcase and, very carefully, I rewrapped it in tissue paper, putting it away in my underwear drawer as carefully as I could. I looked around my room, at my books, the photographs of Meryl and me together and of my friends from school, at my bed, with its white cover and brightly colored pillows, and wondered whose room it was. I may as well have been someone else entirely, a person who’d never heard of West Falls, let alone grown up there.
    There were seven messages on my cell phone: five from Robin, one from my aunt Libby, and one from our old neighbor Mrs. Cleary, who’d just moved to Florida, asking me if I could come over to help her and Mr. Cleary pack. I called Robin back, but she was at her summer internship and couldn’t talk. Then I called Aunt Libby, who isn’t actually my aunt at all — she’s my mother’s cousin, and also my godmother, and also Libby Fine of Libby Fine Design, where Robin was interning. Libby didn’t answer, either. She was just about the most awesome person I’d ever known, and in fact had been the one to encourage me to study in Paris in the first place. The only mystery was how she and my utterly uncool mother were related.
    Robin came over and told me all about how incredible her internship was, and then complained about the other intern, and then told me about her father, who was, like, always drunk, and then told me again about her internship. But the truth was? I just wasn’t interested. Her life seemed so — teenage drama. Over the summer, she’d gotten into these really crazy clothing combinations, like wearing a silky cami with cutoff jeans and hiking boots, and wearing her hair like Pippi Longstocking, in two long, straight, tight braids, and while she talked, my brain just kept flipping back to Paris, and how juvenile she seemed compared to Arnaud. Maybe , I thought, I should have gone further with him. . . .
    I was still thinking about Arnaud when, after what seemed like forever, Robin left. But I didn’t even have time to Facebook him, because two minutes later the door opened and Lucy bounded in, with Meryl just behind, a glass of cherry soda in her hand. “Guess what?” she said. “We’re getting new neighbors. The word is that they’ve got a daughter around your age. Maybe the two of you will hit it off.”
    “I doubt it.”
    “What kind of attitude is that?” she said, putting the cherry soda down on my desk.
    It was a stupid thing — the cherry soda, I mean — but when I was a kid, it was my favorite, a treat that Meryl let me have when I was feeling down or had a cold or just because, and even now Meryl kept it on hand for me for when she thought I was “in a mood.” For one long, weird second, I saw her as I had when I was little, and she was the most wonderful, understanding mother in the world.
    Then she again spoke: “I brought you your favorite.”
    “I can see that.”
    “You seem so bored.”
    “Meryl, it’s called living in the suburbs.”
    “So what I thought was that you, me, and Danny could go to the shore tomorrow or the next day and Dad can join us over the weekend. What do you say?”
    What