Snowed In Read Free Page B

sunnier places.” She laughed. “I sound like a Chamber of Commerce ad, don’t I?” She peered into another room. “So which one is going to be yours?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I went in the other direction, walking along the carpet that lined the floor. Quickly I looked into the four bedrooms on that end of the hallway.
    The rooms had canopied beds and lots of lace and frills.
    I figured this would be a popular floor for our guests, and I was looking for privacy. I’m not unfriendly, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d like living with strangers.
    At the end of the hallway was another set of stairs.
    “I’m going to check out the next floor,” I said.
    “I’ll come with you,” she said as she followed me up the stairs.
    On the next floor, we went in different direc-tions, looking in the various rooms. “These aren’t that much different from the ones on the floor below,” Nathalie said. “Is your mom going to let you fix up your room however you want?”
    “I hope so.”
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    “Let me know if you want to paint it. My boyfriend and I can help you.”
    That was exactly what I wanted—to be a third wheel.
    My best friend, Tara, had recently hooked up with a guy, so I knew from experience that it isn’t fun hanging out with someone when the boyfriend’s around.
    “Thanks, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet,” I told her.
    At the other end of the hallway was yet another set of stairs. They were much narrower than any of the others. And they creaked more.
    Halfway up was a small circular window that looked out on the frozen land and the surrounding lake. My new home.
    The stairs ended. To my left was a door with an ornate glass doorknob that rattled when I turned it. As I opened the door, the hinges squeaked as if they were practicing to be the sound effects in a Hitchcock movie.
    Sunlight filtered through the windows, but still the room was a little dim. I glanced around cautiously, looking for spiderwebs, but couldn’t see any.
    I did see the light switch, though, so I flipped it on. It didn’t make a lot of difference. The four 22
    bulbs in the tulip-shaped holders in the ceiling must have been about fifteen watts. But they made enough of a difference that I could see I’d discovered my haven.
    When Mom and I arrived, I had noticed that one of the upper rooms had a rounded corner, a turret. This was it.
    “Totally awesome!” Nathalie said. “I love this room!”
    I was pretty crazy about it too. In the curved corner was a small sitting area. One side of the room had a window seat covered in pillows of various shades of pink. Vents along the floor blew in the warm air that had finally started circulating through the house after Mom turned on the heater downstairs. A brass bed with a lacy pink canopy caught my attention. So romantic. On either side of the bed were windows that looked out onto the front lawn, the lake, and the trees with their leafless branches covered in icicles and snow.
    “I’ll bet this is where a servant slept,” she said.
    “I think they always made them sleep in the attic.”
    “Is this the attic?” I asked.
    Shrugging, she sat on the window seat, brought her feet up to the pillows, and wrapped her arms around her legs. “You have got to have a sleepover up here.”
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    I sat on the bed. “Sleepover implies multiple friends.”
    Her light blue eyes twinkled. “Hey, you’ve got me. And I have friends.”
    “How many friends?”
    She laughed. “What kind of a question is that?”
    “Well, I researched the school . . . and there aren’t a lot of kids on the island. Back home, we had more than twelve hundred students in my junior class.”
    She looked horrified. “I wouldn’t like that at all.”
    “Well, see, that’s the thing. I don’t know if I’ll like being in such a small school.” It was the one part of Mom’s plan that I worried about. Would I fit in? Would the students accept someone who talked with a slight drawl and was severely challenged