Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy) (F) Read Free

ballerinas all over the place.
    I nodded. “We don’t even have our favorite things here,” I said in a voice just as loud as Mia’s.
    “Shh,” said Lottie, glancing anxiously over her shoulder. “You both know perfectly well that this is only temporary. And the cottage was a catastrophe.” She had given up tugging at my uniform. It didn’t do any good.
    “Yes, so Mr. Spencer says,” said Mia. (We were supposed to call him by his first name, but we pretended we’d forgotten.)
    “Your mother saw the rat with her own eyes,” said Lottie. “Do you two really want to live in a house where there are rats?”
    “Yes,” Mia and I replied in chorus. First, rats are better than their image (we’d found that out when we saw Ratatouille ), and second, you could bet the rat was just as much of an invention as the rest of it. We weren’t as dumb as all that—we knew exactly what was going on here. Mom had laid it on just a tiny little bit too thick to convince us last night. Apparently the cottage had smelled of mold, the heating didn’t work properly, there’d been crows nesting in the chimneys, the neighbors had been rude and noisy, and the surroundings looked dismal. Furthermore, public transport wasn’t good, and the school where we’d originally been going to go had a bad reputation. That, said Mom, was why she’d had to back out of the rental agreement and find this apartment instead—on a temporary basis, of course. (Like everywhere else we’d ever lived.)
    Well, yes, Mom admitted, all that had happened behind our backs, but only because she hadn’t wanted to spoil our vacation with Papa. Anyway, she said, it was for our own good—she’d be commuting to Oxford every day so that we could go to an excellent school here, and also—“to be honest, mousies!”—wouldn’t it be cooler to live in London than out in the country?
    Of course none of this had anything at all to do with the fact that Mr. I-know-what’s-good-for-you Spencer just happened to live in this part of London himself and wanted to have Mom as close to him as possible. Also entirely by chance, the school we’d be going to now just happened to be the school where Ernest’s own children went. The kids we were going to meet at dinner tomorrow.
    There was nothing short of a disaster on the way, that was clear. The end of an era.
    *   *   *
    “I don’t feel well,” I said.
    “You’re only nervous.” Lottie patted Mia’s shoulder reassuringly with one hand while she put a strand of hair back behind my ear with the other. “That’s perfectly normal on your first day in a new school. But believe you me, there’s no reason for you two to have an inferiority complex or anything. You’re both very, very pretty girls, and clever as you are, you don’t have to worry about keeping up with your studies.” She smiled lovingly at us. “My wonderfully clever, wonderfully beautiful, blond elfin girls.”
    “Yup, wonderfully clever, wonderfully beautiful, blond elfin girls, and me with braces on my teeth and nerdy glasses and a nose much too long for me,” muttered Mia, ignoring the fact that Lottie was feeling so emotional that her big, brown, round eyes had gone a little damp. “Two girls of no fixed address.”
    And with a totally deranged mother, probably the oldest au pair girl in the business, and a whole heap of shattered dreams of life in the country , I added silently, but I couldn’t help responding to Lottie’s smile. She was so sweet, standing there beaming at us, full of optimism and pride. Anyway, none of this was her fault.
    “You’ll only have to wear the braces for another six months. You’ll easily see that through, Mia-mouse.” Mom had come in from the next room. As usual, she’d heard only the part of the conversation that she wanted to hear. “Those are really attractive school uniforms.” She gave us a sunny smile and began rummaging around in one of the moving company’s boxes labeled SHOES .
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