Romeo Blue (9780545520706) by Stone Phoebe

Author:Stone, Phoebe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

That next week we had a small Thanksgiving. They had announced on the radio that cooking a turkey would help the war effort, if everyone saved the turkey fat in tins and handed it in. The glycerin in the fat, they said, was greatly needed to make explosives.

I was often busy with The Gram during that time doing things about the house. I was making Christmas decorations out of odd, forgotten things like old silk ribbons found at the bottom of a drawer. We made sweet-smelling clove balls by sticking cloves into unpeeled oranges and tying ribbons round them. Then we hung them over doorways, filling the rooms with the scent of cinnamon and cloves. (Mr. Donovan sent us a box of oranges from Florida for Thanksgiving. It was a great moment when they arrived! Perhaps he got them on the black market.)

I was very busy and so there were times in the day when I had no idea where Derek was at all. Had he gone into Bottlebay to see Mr. Buttons? It was hard for me to know.

When I was helping The Gram clean rooms upstairs one Saturday in December, I saw the gold-printed card of Buttons, Buttons and Babbit lying out on Derek’s desk but that didn’t tell me much. I remembered that night by the fire when he had come back from the dance with Brie. I remembered what he had said to me. “Guess who it is. Guess!” It seemed now that any love he had for me had vanished in a terrible blast.

In the middle of December, winter came at us with full force, bringing sleet and ice and snow, which whirled and whined and wrapped itself all round our house. Sometimes the snow sifted in at the old windowsills and thin ice formed on the glass most exposed to the wind. Then, looking out the windows, we had to peer through white castles and caves and stars of ice patterns.

One blustery day my father said, “Fliss, shall we take a walk?” He meant to put his arm around me, but he reached too far and he knocked the wall behind me and bumped the painting of Ella Bathburn by mistake. Suddenly, she looked all tilted and confused, staring at the floor. Then we had to stop and try to straighten her out and that became difficult because the Bathburn house itself wasn’t terribly level.

After we’d decided on the perfect angle for Ella, my father looked at me shyly. “Sorry, Fliss,” he said. “Shall we carry on? We haven’t had a walk together in ages, have we?”

“Very well, then,” I said. But I held my breath for a moment because a walk seemed to mean that my father might be leaving soon. And it was almost Christmas. Oh, I didn’t want him to go and, oh, I did want him to go. Then I felt all pulled and stretched and twisted because I knew he was going to help Winnie and Danny. I wondered if Winnie and Danny would be allowed to have Christmas in prison.

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