The Girl On The Half Shell Read Online Free Page A

Jack unexpectedly like a flash fire and I am an expert at disappearing. Though not tonight. I was not invisible tonight. They’ll talk about tonight at Harry’s for a while. Perfectly wretched. I was perfectly wretched.
    I lean against the car to wait and realize I am hyperventilating. I can’t feel my limbs, and I know that the car I lean against is damp but I can’t feel that either. Everything looks so strange, the near empty streets, the cluster of people outside the restaurant in the all-but-vacant strip mall, and the way the world looks beneath the bleak fluorescent light of the parking lot. I probably look strange, too.
    I sink to the ground, angry with myself for the senseless drama I created tonight. I am not a dramatic girl. Everyone always says I’m sensible. I am not a mean girl. Everyone always says I’m good. But tonight I went postal over a cocktail.
    I really hate that I’m crying. Time loses the feel of realness when you cry. Seconds can feel like minutes, minutes can feel like seconds, and it is hard to tell which because it is the cry that determines that. Sometimes after I cry I check my watch and I’m always surprised. Sometimes it’s only a few minutes, but it was a really bad cry that feels like forever. And other times its half a day, and it felt like nothing at all, like a dripping faucet, an irritating sound punctuating otherwise normal sound. An irritation, no more significant than that.
    Jack and Rene step off the sidewalk and into the parking lot. I take a deep, steadying breath and stand up. How long have I been waiting? It feels like they’ve left me out here an eternity.
    I watch them cross the parking lot to me. They don’t look strange in the bleak fluorescent light of the parking lot. Jack looks like Jack, perfectly normal, and Rene has that glow about her as if she’s just left the best party and is thoroughly pleased with the world. I curse Rene in my mind for forcing me through the fiasco of dinner, but then, it really wasn’t her fault, and no one is more surprised than I am, that I went postal over a cocktail.
    Postal over a cocktail. It is all very stupid, especially now that I put it that way. They both smile at me as if everything is normal. No one says anything and we climb into the car to make our way home. I am committed to my silence during the car ride to the house and no one disturbs that, and I am grateful that they don’t, though I wish Jack would.
    It is a short drive home, and five minutes later we are on Marina Drive making our way down the dimly lit narrow road into Hope Ranch, the neighborhood I’ve called home since birth. The familiar sights make some of my gloomy mood wane. I love the neighborhood I live in. It is private and quiet and wooded and protected. It is home.
    Marina Drive is lush with woods: sycamore, oak and eucalyptus trees flourish among the richly green vegetation. On one side of the road are the cliffs above the beach. With the windows down and the music off you can hear the crashing surf as you drive, and I love that sound, sounds of home. On the other side is low rising hills with stunning homes upon them. Wayward, paved arteries flow through the thicket, private pockets of modest ranch homes and massive estates.
    My father’s house has been in the family for two generations. It is a rustic, chicly humble Spanish style single story stucco and red tile structure. There is a main wing with two wings jutting off that gives it the shape of a not fully completed square. It sits on a cliff above the ocean, the modestly landscaped five acres left as close to natural as possible, and is only partially enclosed for privacy so as not to intrude on the equestrian trails that cut through Jack’s land.
    No one owns the land or the beach, Chrissie. We are only caretakers. I was five when Jack said that, I was sitting in the yard watching as he pulled down the fencing with his own hands that my grandfather had put in place with his own hands. The