Miss You by Kate Eberlen EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Kate Eberlen
- Language: English
- Genre: contemporary romance
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- Size: 2.8 MB
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Tess
August 1997
In the kitchen at home, there was a plate that Mum bought on holiday in
Tenerife with a hand-painted motto: Today is the first day of the rest of your
life.
It had never registered with me any more than Dad’s trophy for singing,
or the New York snow dome my brother Kevin sent over one Christmas, but
that last day of the holiday, I couldn’t seem to get it out of my head.
When I woke up, the inside of the tent was glowing orange, like a
pumpkin lantern. I inched the zipper door down carefully so as not to wake
Doll, then stuck my face out into dazzling sunlight. The air was still a little
bit shivery and I could hear the distant clank of bells. I wrote the word
“plangent” in my diary with an asterisk next to it so I could check it in the
dictionary when I got home.
The view of Florence from the campsite, all terracotta domes and white
marble towers shimmering against a flat blue sky, was so like it was
supposed to be, I had this strange feeling of sadness, as if I was missing it
already.
There were lots of things I wouldn’t miss, like sleeping on the ground—
after a few hours, the stones feel like they’re growing into your back—and
getting dressed in a space less than three feet high, and walking all the way
to the shower block, then remembering you’ve left the toilet paper in the
tent. It’s funny how when you get towards the end of a holiday, half of you
never wants it to end and the other half is looking forward to the comforts
of home.
We’d been Interrailing for a month, down through France, then into Italy,
sleeping in stations, drinking beer with Dutch boys on campsites, struggling
with sunburn in slow, sticky trains. Doll was into beaches and Bellinis; I
was more maps and monuments, but we got along like we always had since
we met on the first day at St. Cuthbert’s, aged four, and Maria Dolores
O’Neill—I was the one who abbreviated it to Doll—asked, “Do you want to
be my best friend?”
We were different, but we complemented each other. Whenever I said
that, Doll always said, “You’ve got great skin!” or “I really like those
shoes,” and if I told her it wasn’t that sort of compliment, she’d laugh and
say she knew, but I was never sure she did. You develop a kind of special
language with people you’re close to, don’t you?
My memories of the other places we went to that holiday are like
postcards—the floodlit amphitheater in Verona against an ink-dark sky; the
azure bay of Naples; the unexpectedly vibrant colors of the Sistine Chapel
ceiling—but that last, carefree day we spent in Florence, the day before my
life changed, I can retrace hour by hour, footstep by footstep almost.
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