She adored her mother, but did she have to say the same thing every time she served coffee? And what about that coffee cloud business? It was frothy, sure, but a cloud? "Nothing like a coffee cloud to start your day the Tracey way!"įreesia forced a smile. "It's Tracey's Famous Coffee!" she told Freesia. Just like that, she returned, bearing Freesia's favorite chunky mug, filled to the brim with steaming, frothy coffee. "Sweetie!" Just like that, Freesia's mother hurried out the door.
No coffee." The very effort of speaking exhausted her. And shinier.įreesia pointed to her white night table, empty except for her bubble, a solid silver ball cradled in a trumpet-shaped charger. She looked a lot like Freesia, only older. She looked mom-perfect, as always: nice and trim with shiny brown hair, shiny tanned skin, shiny pink nails. Graceful waterbirds dove for silver fish, and twenty kinds of flowers released their perfume into the still, cool morning air.īut Freesia didn't notice any of this, because it looked perfect and pretty and peaceful like this every morning, and besides, she still hadn't had her coffee.įreesia's mother appeared at the door, almost as if she'd been waiting. The rising sun cast a pink glow on the glassy ocean that lay beyond the island's crystal sand. Rather, they started their tune-Chase Bennett's latest, to be exact.įreesia shooed the peacocks back out to the balcony. Just like that, the peacocks changed their tune. "Shut it!" she told Ashley and Jennifer as they began their second round of screeching. When Freesia was tired, she didn't flip out. Instead they just kind of screeched and screamed, which would have flipped Freesia out if she hadn't been so utterly tired from staying so utterly late at Ricky Leisure's pool party.
The first sign had come a few minutes earlier, when the two peacocks, Ashley and Jennifer (both of whom were boys), failed to wake Freesia with the latest Chase Bennett song. The missing coffee? Yes, it was a sign-the second on that day alone-that something in Freesia's world had gone very, very wrong. Nothing so terrible that you'd cry malfunction, but still.īut Freesia never looked for, considered, or even noticed much of anything, good or bad, until she'd had her first cup of frothy coffee, and this morning, for the first time in her admittedly short memory, no coffee smells tickled her nose when she sat up among her fuzzy pink and orange pillows and stretched her toned, tanned arms toward the cloud mural overhead. Had she been paying attention, Freesia would have noticed that things on the island had fallen a little bit out of sync. The sudden departures that bordered on disappearances. The signs were all there, but Freesia chose to ignore them.
0 kommentar(er)
