How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff (@RandomHouseCa) #seenreadingTO
Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 9:46AM ;)
Eastbound, Queen and Laing
Asian female, 40s, with short black hair, wearing long tan coat, tweed cap and Hunter wellies.
How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff (Random House)
Page 23:
She told me things I never knew like her sister was all set to go to university to study history when she fell in love with my father and decided not to go after all, which made their father furious. When she went away to live in America hardly any of the family was speaking to her. Then from the top of her desk Aunt Penn took down a framed picture of two young women looking almost the same, one of them laughing and one looking serious and holding on to the neck of a huge wild-looking gray dog Aunt Penn said was called Lady, as a joke because she had no manners at all, but look how your mother adored her. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of my mother at home, but almost always with my father and not a single one taken before he knew her, so this was strange because she looked so different, happy and young like someone you’ve known in another life. Aunt Penn said I could keep the photograph but I said No thank you because it seemed to belong to that desk and that room, and I didn’t want to drag it away to a foreign place.
The Zamboni circled the ice rink, starting at the outer edges, working its way closer to the centre, erasing the grooves left during the first period of open skate. She sat in the change room hugging a Styrofoam cup of vending machine hot chocolate, a square of sponge toffee balanced on her knee. The boy beside her fanned through a stack of hockey cards, showing them off to the other grade four students, tapping them carefully into a tidy block he wrapped in two thick elastic bands. He dropped the lot into the base of his boot, the pack bouncing gently before settling into the heel. He toed his way to the boards, first on the ice before the Zamboni had parked itself in the belly of the building, a smattering of applause fading into a new mix of 70s top hits. She peered into the boot, a full set of Ninja cards, and Welcome Back, Kotter, too, waiting at home, coated in a sheet of petrified bubble gum dust, no perceived value in the trade market that she knew of. She shuffled down the bench placing her feet into the boots of her classmate, signaling to their teacher a sudden need to use the washroom.
