Sleeping Beauty Read Free Page A

ate and made a messwith their food. Anne would have been silent if she could, but she was thirteen and had no excuse. She talked about her friends.
    â€œAmy and I played word games by the pond.”
    â€œAmy?” asked Ethan. “Is that a new friend?”
    â€œSort of. She lives a couple of blocks from here.”
    â€œWhat’s her last name?” Marian asked. “Do we know her family?”
    â€œI think we should let Anne keep her friends to herself,” Ethan said as Anne flushed. “Is that all?” he asked her. “You don’t have anything else to tell us about your week?”
    She shook her head, loving her grandfather but angry at him at the same time because he never spent as much time with her as she wanted. She loved him so much she wanted him all the time; he was the gentlest of all of them, and he seemed interested in her, and Anne hated it that so many people came between them. Of course he had his very important business and his very important friends; he had his own life. He was far too busy to spend time with Anne—and anyway, he probably wasn’t that interested. Why would a sixty-five-year-old man want to hang around with a thirteen-year-old girl, even if she was his granddaughter?
    It sounded sensible when she thought about it that way, but still, it made her angry. She seemed to be angry most of the time, at a lot of people. She didn’t want to be; she just was. She hated people and she hated a lot of things that happened around her. She’d felt that way ever since her mother died. That was when she was seven, and Marian had come one night to take her and Gail to Ethan’s house, where she was living. And then a little later she married Fred Jax and took Anne and Gail to a different house, and almost right away had Keith and then Rose. Starting with the time Marian took her from her own house, Anne never felt she belonged anywhere.
    And that was when she started hating. It was something she couldn’t stop, even though it made her feel different from everybody else, and always alone. It wasn’t that her family didn’t pay attention to her; they did. But it seemed toher it was mostly to criticize, and mostly about dirt: she didn’t wash her hair or comb it, she didn’t wash her face, she didn’t clean under her nails, she tracked dirt into the house. All over the world people were starving or thrown in jail for talking about freedom, or sleeping in the streets because they didn’t have a house, but her family worried about dirt. They criticized her for disappearing for hours into the woods near their house, too, but Anne knew they really didn’t care what she did. They just wanted her to be quiet and nice and clean, and make them feel good about doing such a great job of bringing her up. Somehow Gail could do that, but Anne was too angry; she just couldn’t do anything right.
    â€œCould I be excused?” she asked.
    â€œNot before dessert,” her father said automatically.
    â€œI don’t want any.”
    â€œYou’re not going into the forest at night,” said Aunt Marian.
    â€œIt’s sunshine,” Anne said loudly. She stood beside her chair, rocking from one foot to the other, her body straining to dash off. They were all looking at her. “It’s summer and it’s only eight o’clock and the sun is shining and smart people go outside when it’s warm and sunny, they don’t sit around the dinner table getting soggy and fat from all that food just lying in their stomachs! That’s like dying! Your life is just oozing away, puddling under the table in a pool of slime!”
    â€œOh, Anne, what kind of talk is that for the dinner table,” Nina said reproachfully.
    Ethan chuckled. “That’s the picture I’ll think of every time I sit over my coffee.”
    â€œOr you dry up,” Anne went on, emboldened. “You sit around with lights on instead