Alice-Miranda In New York 5 by Jacqueline Harvey

Author:Jacqueline Harvey [Harvey, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Child fiction
ISBN: 978-1-7427-5115-3
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2012-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Alice-Miranda, Ava and Quincy said goodbye to Lucinda and headed for the back door. Lucinda raced out the front. She didn’t dare be late as her mother was picking her up so they could go to the Daytons’ for afternoon tea. The week before, just as her father had ordered, her mother had invited bossy Bernadette Barrington and her ghastly daughter Bethany over to the house. And as always Bethany spent the whole time nosing her way through Lucinda’s bedroom, moving her collection of miniature animals all over the shelf, riding her rocking horse so hard that Lucinda thought at any minute she might launch it through the window, and insisting on playing hide and seek (which Lucinda worried gave Bethany way too much time on her own).

This afternoon would be just as torturous but for a whole other set of reasons. Carissa Dayton didn’t speak. She just nodded and stared. Lucinda always wondered what was going on in her head. Her mother Fifi spent her whole life telling everyone about how clever Carissa was. She was always coming first in this and that and giving recitals on the violin and piano and more recently the harp. Lucinda thought it was a pity that no one had ever taught her how to talk.

Lucinda made her way across the street and disappeared into the back of the town car where her mother was waiting for her.

Alice-Miranda, Ava and Quincy bounced along towards the 77th Street subway entrance on Lexington Avenue. As they descended the stairway, Alice-Miranda stopped and raised her nose in the air. She took in a deep breath.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ Quincy called back to her.

‘Taking it all in,’ Alice-Miranda replied. ‘I want to savour all of the smells and the sounds of the subway, seeing as this is my first time on it.’

‘You know, sometimes you foreign people are a little on the weird side,’ Ava giggled. ‘The subway smells like the subway.’

‘Oh no, it smells like cold concrete compressed with the scent of millions of travellers and the seasons and food. It’s like nothing I’ve ever come across before,’ Alice-Miranda bubbled.

‘Like I said, sometimes I just don’t understand you people from other countries. Anyway, hurry up or we’ll miss the next train,’ Ava urged her little friend.

Quincy and Ava both had metro passes because they travelled on the subway every day. Alice-Miranda’s mother wanted to pre-purchase her daughter’s ticket too but Alice-Miranda insisted that she buy her own. Ava and Quincy guided her over to the ticket machine where they quickly worked out what to do and then helped another man, who was on holiday from Sweden, work out how to buy his pass too.

The girls then proceeded through the turnstile and descended another flight of stairs to the platform below.

‘It’s rather lovely for a subway,’ Alice-Miranda remarked.

‘There ain’t nothing lovely about the subway,’ Quincy said, frowning.

‘But look at all those mosaic tiles. Someone spent a lot of time creating that 77th Street sign,’ Alice-Miranda observed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.