CHRISTA COMES OUT OF HER SHELL BY ABBI WAXMAN –eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Abbi Waxman
- Language: English
- Genre: contemporary romance
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SOOTY TERN
ONYCHOPRION FUSCATUS
So, I’m going to kick off by making one thing very clear: None of this
was my fault. I was part of it, sure, but only like a flea is part of a cat. I
was carried along, contributing my own pain-in-the-ass factor, no argument
there, but I was not, in any sense, driving the bus. Let’s not forget that when
this story starts, I was literally on an island in the middle of nowhere. Hands
full, head busy, heart well guarded. Safe as houses, baby.
Wait, that’s not completely accurate. The island of Violetta isn’t in the
middle of nowhere; it’s slightly to the right of Africa, many hundreds of
miles into the Indian Ocean. It’s a geographical, political and sociological
anomaly. It’s also home to a frozen vodka drink called the Barrier Island,
beyond which no man may safely travel, but that’s a sidenote. It lies two
days’sail from a large French-speaking island more than five hundred miles
off the east African coast, which is probably why the French didn’t bother
to claim it. It was ignored by the Mauritians, because they thought the
French already nabbed it, and blithely disregarded by the British, who had
no idea who owned it, but had no reason to think it was them.
No one paid much attention to it at all until the 1950s, when an
enterprising young Violettan by the name of Agnes Bottlebrush did a school
project on the even younger United Nations and then quietly applied for
membership for Violetta (Agnes was an overachiever with time on her
hands). As the result of a series of fortunate and slightly comedic events,
Violetta became the smallest member of the United Nations, and Agnes
received a rapid promotion to Head Girl. Then she walked around to
everyone’s houses and handed them a copy of the UN Charter and gathered
suggestions for what to put on the flag.
Agnes’s successful endeavors attracted the notice of the BBC, and they
sent a camera crew, along with a reporter who’d been the quickest to raise
his hand when asked, “Who wants to spend two weeks on a sunny island in
the middle of nowhere?” (In a strange but not wholly unprecedented turn of
events,1 that journalist’s son married Agnes Bottlebrush’s daughter several
decades later, proving something about destiny, or karma, or the importance
of follow-up when it comes to good journalism.) Bear with me; there may
be a test later.2
The capital of Violetta, such as it is, is also called Violetta, and has a
population of around two thousand, of which several hundred are visiting
scientists of all kinds. Why, you may ask, are so many drawn so far for so
little? Well, it all goes back to the island’s anomalous nature and fortuitous
location.
Geographically, the island is too far from the coast to be readily reached
by casual travelers, too inhospitable to be easily settled and too daunting
from a distance (cliffs on most sides and a whacking great volcano in the
middle). This peaceful lack of interruption for millennia gave rise to flora
and fauna that aren’t seen anywhere else, which in modern times brings a
steady stream of scientists to the yard.
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