Shattered by Sarah N. Harvey

Author:Sarah N. Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV039140
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

When I got up the next morning, there was a message from Augie.

Hey Sis,

In the immortal words of Miss Piggy, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.” I always loved those red glasses. So retro. Ask the poetry chick for a sextina. And good luck avoiding the stupid and the misinformed.

Love,

Bro

I laughed. Then I felt guilty for laughing. There’s nothing funny about this, March, I reminded myself. No matter what Augie says. But when I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, the red glasses looked less hideous than they had the day before. My hair, however, was still a disaster. I frowned at my reflection. The glasses looked ugly again. Weird. Maybe I was one of the stupid and misinformed.

Mom and Dad had already left for work. A note on the table said, Have a great day at work, honey. Pad Thai for dinner. XO Mom PS. English muffins in fridge. She knows I love English muffins. Well-toasted, with tons of butter and strawberry jam. I poured myself a bowl of Dad’s All-Bran and covered it in skim milk. It tasted like wet sawdust. But at least I’d be regular.

I left early to catch the bus to work. I wanted to find Poetry Girl and ask her to sell me a sextina. Whatever that was. I could have googled it, but I wanted to be surprised. It sounded kinda dirty, which could be interesting. More interesting than the poetry I’d had to read for school anyway.

It felt strange to be walking through my neighborhood at eight thirty in the morning. Lots of sprinkler systems pumping precious water onto ridiculously green front lawns. I paid enough attention in my environmental studies class to know that watering lawns was insane.

Mrs. Lombardi, our next-door neighbor, looked up from picking up her paper and glared at me. She’s known me since we moved here when I was six. She always calls me Bella. Beautiful. Now I looked like a stranger to her. An ugly stranger.

“Hi, Mrs. Lombardi,” I called out. “Lovely morning.”

She did a double take. Staggered backward and dropped the paper, a hand to her heart, her wig askew.

I would have laughed, if it hadn’t been so sad.

Stupid and misinformed, I thought as I walked on to the bus stop.

I stopped at the McDonald’s to buy Poetry Girl an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee. I filled my pockets with sugar packages, creamers, stir sticks and napkins. When I got to her corner, she greeted me with a smile even before I handed her the paper bag of food.

“You again,” she said.

“Yup. I’m in the market for a sextina. You got any for sale?”

“A sextina,” she said after she had taken a few bites of the Egg McMuffin and shared some of it with her cat. She added six sugars and fours creamers to the coffee and stirred it dreamily, staring across the street at a guy pulling cans out of a garbage can.

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