ThinandBeautiful.com by Liane Shaw Read Free Book Online

all that happened.
    My family is pretty small so I could never really understand how Annie could stand spending the whole summer out at some cottage with no phone or TV or any of the other essentials, like a computer. I have my mom and dad and Steve. That’s pretty much it. My mom’s parents live about a five-hour drive away. We see them on holidays and stuff but don’t visit allthat much. A weekend here or there. I can’t tell for sure, but I don’t think my mom and my grandma are exactly close. They’re polite to each other and everything but they seem kind of tense when they’re together. My grandpa is pretty quiet and seems almost shy. Steve and I have always really liked being with him when we do visit. He’s just kind of gentle. Grandma can be a lot louder and likes to tell us what to do even though she hardly sees us. My mom gets annoyed with her and then she tells my mother what to do. That doesn’t tend to go over very well. My dad’s parents both passed away. His dad died when he was just a little kid and his mom died when I was little. Sad. I have an uncle on my dad’s side who has a couple kids. I’ve only met them a few times. They seem pretty nice but I don’t really feel like they are family or anything. Polite strangers, mostly. My mom has a sister who doesn’t have any kids.
    I have Steve. There seems to be a two-kid pattern here. He’s kind of a typical big brother. He can be a total pain in the backside when he wants to be, the champion of teasing and making my life miserable, and then he can turn around and be totally nice and supportive when I need someone to help me or protect me from things that go bump in the night. Nice when he needs to be and a total pain when he wants to be. I kind of hope he has some kids some day in the distant future so I have nieces and nephews. It might be fun to have a bigger family someday. I don’t know if I’ll ever have kids. So far, the whole romance department is pretty lacking.
    Annie has more relatives than I can count. She said there are always lots of cousins around in the summer and they really liked spending time together, swimming and hiking and doingother activities that she seemed excited about but seemed less than thrilling to me, unless of course they came with a weekend at a cool chalet. I try to imagine being surrounded by piles of people who are all related to me, doing all sorts of outdoorsy things, but it just doesn’t compute for me at all.
    Then again, Annie thought that my summer plans were pretty boring too, only she was always too polite to actually say so. I usually spend part of my summer hanging around doing nothing in particular except practicing the piano and trying to stay out of my mother’s way so she won’t find things for me to do. Sometimes I go out to Ruth’s place and try out farm life for a day or two. She has a couple of horses that she spends lots of time with in the summer and she has tried to teach me to ride a few times. I decided I was better on a bike. My bike listens to me and doesn’t have teeth. Alyssa does a lot of traveling in the summer. She still has lots of relatives in Europe that her mom takes her to see. I offered to go and keep her company a couple of times, but no one took me up on it. Devon did the sports camp thing most years when she was little, and she’s now training to be a counselor so she can actually make some money. So, amusing myself in the summer has always been a challenge, except when I went to camp.
    Yes, I said camp. I know that sounds kind of weird from someone who just dismissed the idea of hanging out at a cottage swimming and hiking, but my camp wasn’t exactly what you think of when you talk about camp. My dad always called camp my home away from home, only better. It was pretty nice. We slept in cabins with actual mattresses on the beds. There was a lounge for older campers where you could watch TV