Moment of Truth by Phoebe Rivers

Author:Phoebe Rivers [Rivers, Phoebe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781442461284
Publisher: Simon Spotlight
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Later that afternoon, I overheard my father and Lady Azura having an intense, murmured conversation together in the kitchen. I thought about listening outside the door, but I didn’t. I entered the kitchen. I could tell by the worried, confused expression on my dad’s face, and the deepening frown lines on Lady Azura’s, that the two were not exactly seeing eye to eye. I felt sure it was about me. And about whether we might have to move.

“I ordered Chinese,” said my father stiffly. “It’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

I nodded. Feeling miserable. Helpless.

Dinner was a quiet affair again.

Monday night I heard the wailing, crying spirit on and off all night. I’d found some earplugs at Elber’s, which helped some, but they didn’t stop me from waking up when the lights flickered on and then off again. A couple of times my radio started blasting for no apparent reason. I ended up unplugging it and using my MP3 as my alarm clock. I woke up feeling exhausted.

At school on Tuesday, I couldn’t bring myself to congratulate Lily about asking Kyle to the dance. She sensed my ambivalence for sure. Her behavior toward me was cool. We sat together at lunch, and we sat together in social studies, and we talked and worked together and even joked around a little. But it still didn’t feel normal. Ever since our brief exchange of texts about how she’d asked Kyle to the dance, we hadn’t discussed it. I couldn’t seem to find the right time to bring him up. Clearly she was upset that I hadn’t been enthusiastic enough about her news. She was right. I hadn’t been.

The wailing spirit wasn’t the only thing that had kept me up the night before. I’d been losing sleep, stressing about Lily. She was my first real friend. I remembered a time not very long ago when I couldn’t imagine having a close friend at all. And now I couldn’t imagine losing her. What would I do if she stopped speaking to me?

My father was becoming borderline obsessed with fire safety. He kept unscrewing outlets and fixtures, checking and rechecking wiring, and peering into the fuse box in the basement. On Tuesday afternoon, he came home from work early with a huge box that turned out to contain one of those collapsible ladders. The kind that you could hook around the window frame of a second- or third-story window, and then toss out and climb down. He put it on a shelf of my closet and made sure I understood how to work it. Then we reviewed—again—the evacuation plan in case of a fire, and where we would convene once outside, and how I absolutely couldn’t stop to grab any of my things. I’d learned all that in preschool, but I realized he needed to do it for his own wobbly peace of mind.

Lady Azura seemed to have convinced herself that my father was acting unreasonably. Even though the last thing in the world I

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