Being Jazmine (Invisible Series Book 3) by Cecily Anne Paterson

Author:Cecily Anne Paterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cecily Anne Paterson
Published: 2018-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

I don’t wear my hearing aids at home for the rest of the day.

Nor the next day.

Nor the day after that.

I put them in for school, but as soon as I come off the bus and up the new path to the house, I take them out again.

It drives Mum crazy. At least four times the first afternoon she walks into my bedroom, talking, and realises I can’t hear her. She taps me on the shoulder. “Jazmine.” She mouths the words really wide, so I can lip read. “Put them in.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to,” I say, and my voice is all muffled in my head. I sign it instead. ‘I don’t want to.’

She makes a tense face at me and walks out again. I can feel the rush of air as she shuts the door hard.

I know I should feel bad for her, and I kind of do, inside, a little bit. But I don’t on the outside. Actually, I feel great. It’s almost like I’m free. I’m an eagle who’s been brought up by pigeons, and I’ve finally figured out how to soar and leave them behind.

I don’t tell Mum that, though. I’m not sure how she’d feel about being called a pigeon. Or about being left behind. She’s cranky with me. I can tell from the way she’s putting the plates down on the table at dinner time and refusing to look at me. I feel sorry for Geoff. He looks a bit lost, like he’s stuck in the middle of a problem he doesn’t even understand. At least he’s trying to be nice about it.

He leans over towards me and starts to talk to me, but I can’t hear him properly and his beard makes lip reading tricky. I shrug helpfully and sign at him. ‘I don’t have my hearing aids in.’ His face drops and his body seems to spring back to his place behind the table. I see him throw a look to Mum, like what am I supposed to do now? She rolls her eyes back at him and says something under her breath.

Eagle, pigeons, I think to myself, and smile.

Mum’s hand slaps the table in front of me, startling me.

‘What are you doing?’ she signs. It’s slow, but it’s clear. Her face is furious, and the rest of her signs are hard to read. ‘This - hard. You - silly.’ She stops to think. ‘No, naughty.’

I stand up and face her. I’m ready to sign back at her, to tell her what’s really hard, what’s really silly, and just for a clue, it’s not me, and it’s not my fault things are like this, and if you actually understood what I’m talking about, you might not be trying to crush me and control me, like Mia says, but Geoff stands up too. He puts his arm around Mum, and leads her away from the table for a moment. I can see him talking to her, and her crying a little and putting her head on his shoulder.

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.