Fire Horse Girl (9780545532242) by Honeyman Kay & Kay Honeyman

Author:Honeyman, Kay & Kay Honeyman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic
Published: 2012-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

THE EYES BURNED, and the mouth was drawn tight. But it was not a guard.

“Father,” I said.

We stared at each other, neither of us moving or speaking. I had grown taller than him since we left China.

“I can explain.” I held my hands out to him, pleading. They shook.

His eyes shifted. Now he was staring through me. “I must be seeing ghosts.” He turned his back to me.

He was not raising the alarm. He did not want to know what I was doing there. He was just going to ignore me.

Father lay down on the bunk below Sterling Promise’s. He was so thin. His clothes swallowed him. I knelt beside him. “Are you feeling well?”

Silence.

“You won’t tell anyone I was here, Father?”

Silence. It stung, but it was an old wound, so the pain was dull.

“I can’t go back to China.”

He turned away from me.

“I am sorry. For everything. But I have to do this.”

He lay there, his face to the wall, motionless.

“I know you are ashamed of me. I am ashamed of myself right now. I wish for once you would try to understand.”

He did not reply.

I stood up. I was truly dead to him. More tears stung, but this was no time for crying. I wanted to talk to him, convince him that I could not return to China, demand that he look at me. I wanted to shout until he did. But I didn’t need another battle.

I returned to searching Sterling Promise’s bag through blurry eyes. I looked at the papers, foreign letters creating foreign words, full of stamps and signatures. I did not know which papers I needed, so I took all of them. I knew that I was destroying his dream for my own. It was selfish, unfair, and everything I had accused him of doing to me. It was also the only way.

I needed just one more thing from Sterling Promise. I dug deeper into the bundle. My hands touched something soft. I pulled it out — pants, the kind the Americans wore and, folded neatly below them, a jacket and shirt. It was Sterling Promise’s suit, the one Uncle had given him. The one he had brought all the way from Hong Kong to wear in America. I rummaged for something else to wear but found nothing. I sighed. I would have to harden my heart. Father still faced the wall. I pulled on the pants and shirt, fumbled with the buttons, and slid my arms into the sleeves of the jacket. I looked around for a place to hide my clothes. There was only Sterling Promise’s bag, so I buried them in the bottom and retied his bundle. The sleeves of the jacket hung to the middle of my hands. The extra length on the pants pooled onto the top of my slippers, but not by much. I tucked the papers into the waist of the pants, took his hat, and stepped back from the bed.

“Good-bye, Father.”

“At least I do not have to feel shame for such a daughter,” he said.

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.