Мэг Кэбот - Avalon High

MEG CABOT AVALON HIGH 

CHAPTER ONE

 You are so lucky.

 Trust my best friend Nancy to see things that way. Nancy is what you would call an

optimist.

 Not that Im a pessimist, or anything. Im just

 Apparently, Im also lucky.

 Lucky? I echoed into the phone. In what way am I lucky?

 Oh, you know, Nancy said. You get to start over. In a whole new school. Where no

one knows you. You can be whoever you want to be. You can give yourself a total

personality makeover, and there wont be anyone around to be all, Who do you think

youre kidding, Ellie Harrison? I remember when you ate paste in first grade.

 I never thought of it that way, I said. Because I hadnt. Anyway, you were the one

who ate paste.

 You know what I mean. Nancy sighed. Well. Good luck. With school and everything.

practical. At least according to Nancy.

 Yeah, I said, sensing even over the thousand-mile difference between us, that, it was

time to hang up. Bye.

 Bye, Nancy said. Then added, Youre so lucky.

 Really, up until Nancy said this, I hadnt thought there was anything lucky about my

situation at all. Except maybe the fact that theres a pool in the backyard of our new

house. We never had a pool of our own. Before, if Nancy and I wanted to go to the pool,

we had to get on our bikes and ride five milesmostly uphillto Como Park.

 I have to say, when my parents broke the news about the sabbatical, the fact that they

were quick to add, And were renting a house with a pool! was the only thing that kept

down the vomit that started coming up in my throat. If you are a child of

professors,sabbatical is probably about the dirtiest word in your own personal vocabulary.

Every seven years, most professors get offered onebasically a yearlong vacation, so they

can recharge and try to write and publish a book.

 Professors love sabbaticals.

 Their kids hate them.

 Because would you really want to uproot and leave all your friends, make all new friends

at a whole new school and just be getting to think, Okay, this isnt so bad, only to have

to uproot yourself again a year later and go back where you came from?

 No. Not if youre sane, anyway.

 At least this sabbatical isnt as bad as the last one, which was in Germany. Not that

theres anything wrong with Germany. I still exchange e-mails with Anne-Katrin, the girl

I shared a desk with in the weird German school I went to there.

 But come on. I had to learn a whole other language!

 At least with this one, were still in America. And okay, were outside Washington, D.C.,

which isnt like the rest of America. But everyone here speaks English. So far.

 And theres a pool.

 Having your own pool is a lot of responsibility, it turns out. I mean, every morning you

have to check the filters and make sure they arent all jammed up with leaves or dead

moles. Theres almost always a frog or two in ours. Usually, if I get out there early

enough, theyre still alive. So then I have to conduct a frog rescue expedition.

 The only way you can rescue the frogs is to reach down into the water to pull the filter

basket out, so Ive ended up touching all sorts of really gross stuff that floats in there, like

dead beetles and newts and, a few times, drowned mice. Once there was a snake. It was

still alive. I pretty much draw the line at touching anything that is capable of sending

paralyzing streams of poison into my veins, so I yelled to my parents that there was a

snake in the filter basket.

 My dad is the one who yelled back, So? What do you want me to do about it?

 Get it out, I said.

 No way, my dad said. Im not touching any snake.

 My parents arent like other parents. For one thing, other peoples parents actually leave

the house to go to work. Some of them are gone for as many as forty-five hours a week,

Ive heard.

 Not mine. Mine are homeall the time . They never leave! Theyre always in their at-

home offices, writing or reading. Practically the only time they come out of their offices

is to watchJeopardy! and then they yell out the answers at each other.

 No one elses parents know all the answers toJeopardy! or yell them out if they do. I

know, Ive been to Nancys house and seen the evidence for myself. Her parents

watchEntertainment Tonight after dinner, like normal people.

 I dont knowany of the answers onJeopardy! Thats why I sort of hate that show.

 My dad grew up in the Bronx, where there arent any snakes. He completely hates

nature. He totally ignores our cat, Tig. Which of course means that Tig is crazy about

him.

 And if my dad sees a spider, he screams like a girl. Then my mom, who grew up on a

ranch in Montana and has no patience for spidersor my dads screaming, will come in and

kill it, even though Ive told her a million times that spiders are extremely beneficial to

the environment.

 Of course, I knew better than to tell my mom about the snake in the pool filter, because

shed probably have come out and snapped its head clean off right in front of me. In the

end, I found a forked branch, and pulled it out that way. I let it go in the woodsy area

behind the house were renting. Even though the snake didnt turn out to be that scary

once I finally got the guts to save it, I kind of hope it doesnt come back.

 Theres other stuff you have to do if you have your own pool, besides clean out the filter

baskets. You have to vacuum the pool floorthis is kind of funand you have to test the

water all the time, for chlorine and pH. I like testing the water. I do it a few times a day.

You put the water in these little test tubes, and then add a couple drops of this stuff, and

then if the water in the test tubes turns the wrong color, you have to drop some powder

into the filter baskets. Its a lot like chemistry, only better, because when youre done,

instead of a stinky mess like the kind I always ended up with last year in chem class, you

get beautiful clear blue water.

 I spent most of the summer that we moved to Annapolis messing around with the pool. I

say messing around with. My brother Geoffhe left for his first year of college the

second week in Augustput it a different way. He said I was acting like a freak about it.

 Ellie, he said to me so many times I lost count, relax. You dont need to be doing this.

Weve got a contract with a pool company. They come every week. Let them do it.

 But the pool guy doesnt reallycare about the pool. I mean, hes just doing it for the

money. He doesnt see the beauty of it. Im pretty sure.

 But I guess I can see where Geoff was coming from. I mean, the pool did sort of start

taking up a lot of my time. When I wasnt cleaning it, I was floating on top of the water,

on one of these inflatable rafts I made my mom and dad buy for us over at the Wawa.

Thats the name of the gas stations here in Maryland. Wawas. They dont have any

Wawas back home in Minnesota. Just, like, Mobils and Exxons or whatever.

 Anyway, we filled them up at the Wawa, toothe raftswith the air hose meant for people

to use on their tires, even though you arent supposed to use an air hose to fill a raft. It

says so right on the raft.

 But when Geoff pointed this out to my dad, he just went, Who cares? and filled them

up anyway.

 And nothing bad happened.

 I tried to keep the same routine going for the whole summer. Every day I got up and put

on my bikini. Then I grabbed a Nutri-Grain bar and headed down to the pool to check the

filter baskets for frogs or whatever. Then when the pool was all clean, I got onto one of

the rafts with a book and started floating.

 By the time Geoff left for school, I was so good at floating that I could do it without

even getting my hair wet or anything. I could go all morning without a break, right up

until my mom or dad would come out onto the deck and say, Lunch.

 Then Id go inside and Mom and Dad and I would have peanut butter and jelly, if I was

the one cooking that day, or ribs from Red Hot and Blue down the road if it was one of

my parents turn, on account of them both being too busy writing books to cook.

 Then Id go back out to the pool until my mom or dad came out and said, Dinner.

 I didnt think this was a bad way to pass the last few weeks of summer.

 But my mom did.

 I dont know why she had to go and make it her business how I spend my time. I mean,

shes the one who let Dad drag us out here in the first place, on account of the book hes

researching. She could have written her own bookon my namesake, Elaine of Astolat,

the Lady of Shalottback home in St. Paul.

 Oh yeah. Thats the other thing about having professors as parents: They name you after

totally random authorslike poor Geoff, after Geoffrey Chauceror characters from

literature, such as the Lady of Shalott, aka Lady Elaine, who killed herself because Sir

Lancelot liked Queen Guinevereyou know, the one Keira Knightley played in that King

Arthur moviebetter than he liked her.

 I dont care how beautiful the poem is about her. Its not exactly cool to be named after

someone who killed herself over a guy. I have mentioned this several times to my

parents, but they still dont get it.

 The name things not the only thing they dont get, either.

 Dont you want to go to the mall? my mom started asking me every single day, before I

could escape to the pool. Dont you want to go to the movies?

 But now that Geoff had left for college, I had no one to go to the mall or the movies

withno one except my parents. And no way was I going with them. Been there, done

that. Nothing like going to the movies with two people who have to dissect the film to

within an inch of its life. I mean, its Vin Diesel, okay? What do theyexpect ?

 Schools going to start soon enough, Id say to my mom. Why cant I just float until

then?

 Because its not normal, my mom would say, when Id ask her this.

 To which I would reply, Oh, and you would know what normal is, because, lets face it,

she and my dad are both freaks.

 But she wouldnt even get mad. Shed just shake her head and say, I know what normal

behavior for a teenage girl is. And floating in that pool by yourself all day is not it.

 I thought this was unnecessarily harsh. Theres nothing wrong with floating. Its actually

pretty fun. You can lie there and read, or, if your book gets boring or you finish it and are

too lazy to go inside and get a new one or whatever, you can watch the way the sunlight

reflects off the water onto the backs of the leaves of the trees above you. And you can

listen to the birds and cicadas and, off in the distance, the rat-tat-boom of gunnery

practice down at the Naval Academy.

 We saw them, sometimes. The middies, I mean, or midshipmen as they preferred to be

called, the student officers. In their spotless white uniforms, walking in pairs downtown,

whenever my parents and I went to buy a new book for me to read and coffee for them at

Hard Bean Coffee and Booksellers. My dad would point and say, Look, Ellie. Sailors.

 Which isnt that weird, really. I guess he was trying to make girl talk. You know, because

I cant get any of that from my mom, the spider killer.

 I guess I was supposed to think the middies were cute, or something. But I wasnt going

to talk about cute guys with mydad . I mean, I appreciated the effort, and all, but in a way

it was just as bad as Moms Why dont you let me take you to the mall? thing.

 And its not like my dad spenthis days doing anything all that exciting. The book hes

writing is even worse than Moms, on the boredom barometer. Because his is about a

sword. A sword! It isnt even a pretty sword, with jewels or gold or anything. Its all old

and has these rust spots and isnt worth a dime. I know because the National Gallery over

in D.C. let my dad bring it home so he could study it closer. Thats why we moved here

so he can look at this sword up close. Its sitting in his officewell, the office of the

professor whose house were renting while hes in England on his own sabbatical,

probably studying something even more worthless than Dads sword.

 Museums let you borrow stuff and bring it home if its of academic interest (in other

words, not worth anything) and if youre a professor.

 I dont know why my parents had to choose medieval times as their field of study. Its

the most boring era of all, except possibly prehistoric times. I know Im in the minority in

thinking this, but thats because most people have this really messed up idea about what