My Secret Guide to Paris by Lisa Schroeder

Author:Lisa Schroeder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

I still think it’s amazing that your grandma went to all of this trouble for you,” Phoebe said. She reached down and unbuttoned her coat; the day had gotten warmer. “And so far in advance, too.”

“Grandma Sylvia was the most organized person I’ve ever met,” I said. “Every year, she had most of her Christmas shopping finished by September. She’d tease me about it and make me so curious about what I’d be getting from her.”

“You know you definitely have to tell your mum, right? So you can go back and get all of the packages?”

“I wish there was something else I could do,” I said. “Some other way I could talk them into giving me the boxes.” I turned to her. “I know. Maybe we could convince Alice to pretend to be my mom.”

Now Phoebe was the one to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

“We could get her a wig,” I said, my imagination going wild. “Some glasses. Put a frumpy coat on her.”

Before she could respond, a mime walked up not far from where we sat, put a black top hat out upside down on the sidewalk (for collecting money, I assumed), and began to perform.

“Oh, she’s so cute!” Phoebe whispered.

It was true. The mime was completely adorable. She had red lips and cheeks, which really stood out on her painted-white face. She wore a black beret with a black-and-white-striped bow that matched her striped shirt and tights. Her black skirt was cinched with a bright red belt. And then there were her shoes: red flats with bows. She wore white gloves, too, which I noticed as she pretended to open an umbrella.

She cautiously took a step forward, and stepped back. Her eyes glanced up, and then down. Again, she took a step, and now I understood—the umbrella wasn’t because it was raining, it was because she was pretending to be a tightrope walker.

A crowd gathered to watch the mime walk oh-so-carefully across the tightrope that didn’t really exist. Her movements were so exact, so spot-on, it was amazing. And then, just as she eased up a little bit, seeming to feel more comfortable with her balancing act, her hands started waving around, like she had lost her balance. It was the strangest thing, watching her on the sidewalk, being afraid that she might fall from the pretend tightrope.

When she finally regained her balance, her feet planted in the exact same spot the entire time, the mime gave us the biggest grin, like she was very proud of herself. We couldn’t help but applaud.

Once she got off the tightrope, she pretended to walk down a ladder to the ground. And when she reached the bottom, she stepped away a few feet, closed her umbrella, and leaned against it, like a cane.

Her facial and body expressions told us someone was talking to her. She put her face into her shoulder at one point, acting shy. Then she waved the person off, as if to say, “Oh no, you’re too kind.” A

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