Starry Night by Isabel Gillies Read Free Book Online Page A

Farah plays Dinah like a tiny fiddle. The last thing I wanted was Dinah getting all up in my business, so I intervened.
    â€œShhh, you guys, come on. Let’s go see the dress.” I left the bathroom, passing Reagan, who was headed back in.
    â€œI hear he’s adorable,” Reagan said.
    I felt a flash of annoyance rip through me again, as if she had just taken my magazine.
    â€œWho’s adorable?” Dinah has ears for boy-talk like a bloodhound has a nose for a missing person.
    â€œWren’s got a crush on a rock star in Oliver’s room,” Reagan said, popping her head out of the bathroom.
    â€œReagan!” I looked at Padmavati like, Thanks, and she looked at me like, What?
    â€œThat is just so wrong,” Dinah said, cracking up.
    â€œLet’s go to your mom’s room and look at the dress,” Farah commanded.
    â€œI’m doing my makeup,” Reagan called from the bathroom.
    â€œI think I won’t go into your mother’s boudoir while she’s dressing, thank you,” Charlie said, and pulled a math textbook out of his knapsack.
    â€œ What is going on? Who does Wren have a crush on?” Dinah whined, scrambling to follow Farah.
    â€œDinah, please—go downstairs and do something else! We have to get ready. ”
    â€œâ€˜We have to get ready,’” Dinah mimicked, rolling her eyes and following May out the door, her blunt bob swinging. Dinah wasn’t invited to the party.

 
    11

    Anytime someone compliments our house, my mother mentions what a wreck it was when she and Dad bought it. My first memory is being held by my father and looking around the kitchen that had eggplant-colored wallpaper peeling off the walls and very heavy drapes the previous owners had left on the French doors to the garden outside. I must have been two years old. I remember the feeling of his scratchy tweed blazer on the bottom of my thighs and putting my hand out to touch the dust drifting around in the light coming through the French doors. The scattering of particles in air is called the Tyndall effect—I learned eleven years later in Mr. Chin’s eighth-grade Earth Science class, but as a child I had no idea it was dust or particles, I thought it was just what light looked like up close. The glass in one of the panes was broken and Dad must have thought I was going for the sharp edge. He pulled my hand back and said, “Don’t touch it, my darling, it will surely cut you.” Sometimes both my parents think I am going to do something dangerous when I am really just trying to touch the light.
    Now the glass in the windows is clear and storm-proof, and the walls are a deep butter-yellow—“like Rome in an August sunset,” my mother often sighs. There are Persian rugs running down the halls, and under those rugs the beaten-up floors are made from smooth, wide wooden planks. Photographs and paintings hang on the walls from the floor to the ceiling, all mixed up. There is a picture of Oliver in his purple West Side Little League uniform, right next to a Sylvia Mangold drawing of a tree—a present my father gave my mother when I was born. In every room (including my parents’ bathroom), deep, soft upholstered chairs and sofas are arranged so you can gather and talk, read, or take a nap—and you are encouraged to do all of those things. And on every side table are lamps with kraft-paper lampshades. All the lamps are different: eighteenth-century Dutch white and blue porcelain tabac jars, Italian owls from Siena, metal milk jugs found in barn sales, blown thick smooth Simon Pearce glass. It’s a real mishmash, but the shades are exactly the same. “Having uniform shades saves this room from looking hodgepodge,” I can hear my mother saying. We don’t have any overhead lighting because that is for hospitals and department stores—not for homes.
    The real reason why we live in such a big house and have all