Butterfly Summer by Anne-Marie Conway

Author:Anne-Marie Conway
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781409538592
Publisher: Usborne Publishing
Published: 2012-05-01T14:32:26+00:00

Mum was in the kitchen when I got home. There were dishes everywhere and it was beginning to smell. She was sitting at the table with a piece of red puzzle in her hand.

“Look, I’ve made a start on the poppies,” she said. “They’re so much easier than the sky.” The sky was finished and there were little piles of red dotted about in front of her. I didn’t get too close in case she realized I’d been swimming. My hair was dry but I could still smell the chlorine on my skin. It would’ve been so great to tell her. To share the day. The secrets between us were growing out of control, like some sort of mutant bacteria.

“Have you called up about any of those jobs in the paper?” I asked. “I mean, the puzzle looks great, but you haven’t been doing it all day, have you? Maybe you could even speak to someone at Hartons? See if they have something else you could do.”

“Don’t start nagging, Becky. I’m not feeling too good. I’ll get onto it tomorrow, I promise.”

Another promise she wouldn’t keep. Mum had changed so much since we got to Oakbridge. She’d always been secretive about the past, but now it was as if she was disappearing inside herself. She was hiding something from me, something bad, something to do with Oakbridge and my dad and the photo under the bed, and I badly needed to know what it was.

I stopped at the doorway watching her for a moment. She was concentrating on the puzzle, fiddling around with one of the pieces, but her face was as sad as I’d ever seen it. “Mum, I was just wondering, are you sure we never came to Oakbridge, you know, after you moved away?”

She looked up, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“It just seems weird, in a way, that you left and never came back. And I keep getting this feeling...”

“What sort of feeling?”

“I don’t know, just a funny feeling. Like certain places in Oakbridge feel so familiar sometimes.”

She looked back down at the puzzle. “I never came back here after I left. Not once.” Her voice was shaking slightly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must be imagining things. Where have you been exactly? Where did you get this feeling?”

I shook my head, sighing. “Look, it doesn’t matter. Forget it. I’m going up to my room.”

I tossed and turned for most of the night – it was so unbearably hot. I kept thinking about Mack and the pool and the way I felt when I first walked into the building. How could some place I’d never been to feel so familiar? I could never explain to Mum. It was just a sense, a distant recollection, but the noise and the smell – they’d felt as real as if I’d been going there all my life.

It was almost morning by the time I finally dropped off to sleep. I dreamed about my dad. We were swimming underwater and it was completely silent.

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.