Lifting the Sky Read Free Page B

them,
poof!
—they’d disappear. I used to wonder what I was seeing, but I just figured everyone sawthe same exact way I did. The one time I did say something about flashing lights, my mom rushed me straight off to an eye doctor. He gave me some drops. But of course the drops hadn’t changed anything. I still saw lights, but I learned to say nothing about them, and to pay no attention to them. As I got older the lights had grown dimmer and dimmer.
    But
these
lights I couldn’t ignore. Was it because we were so high up in the mountains? Or because of the pure mountain air?
    I looked around. Even the sky seemed bluer than blue and alive with tiny balls of bright bouncing lights. The trees shimmered with a reddish gold glow. I stared at my mom, who was now looking intently at me. She glowed like a rainbow too.
    My mind raced. And then suddenly I remembered the story my mom told me about how she’d come up with my name, Blue, when my eyes weren’t even close to being blue—in fact they’re greenish brown. The way my mom told the story, when I was born there was a deep blue hazy light around me that all those in the room could see. It was indigo blue, she said, as blue as the farthest mountains beneath an evening sky, and all the pretty names she’d thought of had flown right out the window and into the bluest of blues beyond. And that’s why she named me Blue.
    My mom said she never saw the blue light around me again. When I was little I’d look in the mirror, but those blue lights never showed up. Sometimes, though, I’d look at myself in the dark and think I could see a blue-white glow around my hands.
    Just in case you think that with such an introduction into the world I might’ve turned into something special, you’d be wrong. In school I shine in art and I’m pretty good in English and history, but that’s been the extent of my stardom. I’m a dud at basketball, for rather obvious reasons. And then there’s track, which is my favorite sport even though I’m always stumbling over my feet. For some reason they’ve grown at a much faster rate than the rest of me.
    I don’t shine in the area of fashion, either, because when it comes to the subject of clothes, well, the less said the better. Or as my mom says, the less, the better. What fits into one suitcase is all I’ve got. I don’t care, though. There are lots of things more important than clothes. My mom says it’s not the clothes that make the man, and no woman should think they make her, either. And to be perfectly honest, I must’ve missed out on the gene that makes a girl give a hoot about clothes.
    While I’m on the subject of me, my last name’s Gaspard. It’s French ’cause of my dad, who was born in Paris, France, oh my. He dropped off the earth the week before I turned five.
    â€œHe was a sweet-singing, dude-ranch-wrangling, ram-headed, hard-drinking, French-speaking, arrogant charmer,” my mom once said, “and when he was sober he could be a delight, but when he was drunk he was horrid.”
    It was the longest string of words she’d ever strung together. I wrote them down in my journal under the title, “My Dad.” Every time I remember or hear something about him I scribble it down.
    After my dad took off we were on the go searching for him. The ranches my mom hired on at were dude ranches, mostly—the kind of places where sweet-singing French wranglers might be. Later I suspected the tables had turned and she kept moving on so my dad wouldn’t know where to find
us
. The ranches she chose then were all rough-and-tumble hard-working places no dude would ever set foot on, especially someone like my dad.
    Sometimes I wished I didn’t look so much like him. Every once in a while I’d catch my mom staring at me, and then she’d sigh and slip into deep quiet, and I’d know she was thinking of him. I’ve