Today's Reading
"It's a popular elective," I said. "Great professor."
"Nope," Carter said. "Women in Literature and Popular Culture was named in an underground handbook as one of the most popular classes on campus to pick up women who, and I quote, 'need to learn what a real man is.'"
I swear I could hear GiGi laugh all the way from the other side of Michigan.
As if on cue, and with an impeccable sense of timing and irony, Julie Andrews began to sing again, lyrics carried across campus on the autumn breeze.
"Let's start at the very beginning... A very good place to start."
My parents always hated prologues in a book, especially my mother.
"Such a waste of time, don't you think, Emma?" she would ask in her inimitable way that forced you to agree. "Just start at the beginning."
I always disagreed as I believed—like the opening notes to a song— prologues built a sense of mystery and emotion.
So, let's start at the very, very beginning, shall we?
I know how much it would please my parents to think I actually listened to them for once.
PART ONE
First-Person Perfect
CHAPTER ONE
"Why are you wearing that dress, Emma?"
"The better question is, why is everyone here dressed like Wednesday Addams?"
Jess pinches the fabric of my colorful summer dress with her talons. Her nails are like beautiful, lethal weapons.
"People wear black because it's a serious literary event, not the Kentucky Derby!" Jess says. "You look like a rube."
"Rube?" I say, widening my eyes in amazement at her choice of words. "Someone's been reading Flannery O'Connor." I run my fingers up her bare arm like I did as a girl when I'd pretend they were a spider, and I wanted to annoy her. "Oh, I get it. Someone's trying to impress Daddy."
She doesn't wince. My family has grown up Game of Thrones literary- style. We just use words to wound. Our armor is Armani.
"No, I'm simply trying to act like a grown-up," she says. "Which you are now, remember? You're a shiny, new college graduate, Emma."
"But it's a beautiful summer day in Michigan. You're supposed to wear color."
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know my sister has defeated me. I sound like a child. I don't mean to act like such a baby, it's just that my family's pretentiousness has a way of pushing every one of my buttons nonstop, like a kid at a vending machine that just ate his quarters.
"Just not today," Jess says. "It's a matter of respect."
Jess is wearing a little black summer dress that hits just below her knees. It has spaghetti straps, is formfitting on top with a touch of flounce at the hem. Her blond hair and makeup are perfect, and the gloss on her lips shimmers in the filtered summer light. She's one of those girls who looks like she hasn't even made an effort to look beautiful. I called her Peony when I was a girl because she was just so damn perfect, like GiGi's favorite flower.
"Well, you look like you're going to a funeral," I quip. "Which, I guess, we kind of are."
Jess shakes her head at me.
"Not today," she repeats.
I open my mouth to retaliate, but the screened door creaks and bangs shut, sounds that sing to me like the call of the gulls and the soft crash of waves on Lake Michigan. My family has always wanted to put a new front door on Eyebrow Cottage, but I refuse to let them. One summer when I was a girl, I positioned myself in the doorway all weekend, staging a screened door sit-in so that my parents couldn't change the historic red entrance, no matter how much it squawked and banged and disrupted their need for quiet and a "literary life."
"It's old, Emma," my father had tried to reason with me as the workers stood on the front porch, shaking their heads and laughing at my histrionics. "It's loud."
This excerpt is from the ebook edition.
Monday we begin the book The Lost Passenger by Frances Quinn.
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