the darlings are forever by melissa kantor

They saw her and waved back, grinning at her through the window. Just the sight of them comforted her, and she waved madly in the hopes of catching their attention. Through the plate-glass window of Ga Ga Noodle she could see Natalya and Victoria already sitting at their regular table. Squeezing the bag of gifts to her side, she finished crossing the street and pushed tomorrow out of her mind. That would be stomach-tightening enough if One Room had a high school. Tomorrow was the first day of high school. And it wasn’t just because tomorrow was the first day of school. As memories of One Room flew through her head, her stomach turned over. She couldn’t see One Room, the school where she, Victoria, and Natalya had gone since they were five, but she could picture it in her mind’s eye-the bright blue lobby, the walls of the main stairs covered in paintings and poems written by the littlest students. Still bleary-eyed from her overnight flight, she was surprised to be surrounded by plane trees wilting in the late morning sun instead of palm trees swaying in an arid breeze to see the brick buildings of Greenwich Village instead of pink stucco Spanish-style villas.Ĭrossing Sixth Avenue, Jane looked down the block to her right. In Los Angeles, where she’d spent the past month with her dad, it was too dry to sweat. It had taken her longer than she’d expected to wrap the boxes, and racing along the few blocks between her house and Ga Ga Noodle, where she was meeting Natalya and Victoria, had made her sweaty. THE LABOR DAY sun was scorching, and as Jane waited for the light to change, she could practically hear her dark hair frizzing. It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group.

The darlings are forever by melissa kantor