Kindle Edition
Amazon
Kirsten Feldman Books
Kirsten Feldman Books
Kirsten Feldman Books eStore
Category:
Young Adult/Teen
Publisher: KBFeldman Books
ISBN-10: 1501029657
Type: Fiction
Pages: 184
Copyright: September 8, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781501029653
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
In this coming of age story, 16-year-old Harry Kavanaugh struggles to feel at home when she doesn't fit in with her family, her school, or even herself. This eccentric, Nirvana-obsessed, dog-loving girl will run away take your heart but leave you laughing at her snark.
Though she’s nicknamed for the magical Harry Potter, six-foot, dreadlocked Harry Kavanaugh doesn’t find any wonder in her daily life at an exclusive girls’ school outside of Washington, DC. In fact she wants nothing more than to chuck her lot and enter the wilds of public school—too bad she didn’t reckon on a trip to the hospital, a runaway, and a renegade or three, which just might show her a different path to everywhere.
Excerpt
1 in the girls’ bathroom
So it seems clear to me now that what happened, what changed my life from ho-hum to here-we-go-hang-on-tight—the suicide bid, the secret vote, heck, even the regional qualification and the potential trip to South America—happened after I found Frannie. Really her name is Frances Bean, you know, like Kurt Cobain’s daughter, but everyone calls her Frannie. She’s a redhead like me, and unlike the rest of the peons here at Barfmore, that’s what I call this prep school from hell due to the outrageously high eating disorder rate, she can look me in the eye, no mean feat when you’re within spitting distance of six feet. Did I mention that she can touch between her eyes with her the tip of her tongue? I am so not kidding. And that’s the least of her talents, though it’s one of the first ones everyone notices, right up there with the epic drooling. But all I can say is that my life was nowhere until I found Frannie. She’s my good luck token. She helped me formulate my plan to bust out and see the real world. When it was time to call it, heads or tails, we stepped up and took the cue. Want to see for yourself? Then let’s enter my life on the fly, be that fly on the wall, the day I started hopping.
I scurry into the bathroom to escape my tormentors and find my arch-nemesis, my half-sister by the treacherous side of our family, prodding a rabbit the size of a small dog. She is smoking and trying without much success to feed it pieces of hotdog bun, a food product she would never eat herself since she makes toothpicks look wide. It sits in the sink, the rabbit, not the bun or the girl. I can’t help myself; I walk closer. No, I’m not drawn to her orbit like seemingly every other person in the world; she’s just in front of the only unclogged toilet stall. I know this at a glance because the doors cover only the most minimal portion of the doorways to be legal. Upperschoolers were taking too many ciggie breaks, so goodbye truly private doors, but when a girl’s gotta go, a girl’s gotta go, regardless of present company. First things first, and then I’ll take care of the rabbit. Animals and I have an understanding. Felicity is not one of those animals. She is immune to my charms, such as they are, as she is to the rules that apply to the rest of us. I edge into the stall, confident that I have avoided contact both physical and eye, and prepare to lower my tights. With no privacy at Barfmore, I have perfected the show-no-skin approach to dressing and to squatting, most activities really, and so I wriggle them down just enough to plop on the seat with the skirt of my much-maligned uniform blocking all views.
That’s when I notice that said views include two boys, boys, of about my age, maybe a little older. I’m not the best judge of age in boys since a number of factors get in my way when trying to estimate. First, my only brother is eons older than I am, so I never experienced his tender youth. Second, my own body hunched over—its usual position due to my ungainly height—resembles nothing so much as it does a toadstool, squat and prone to unattractive colorations around the gills. I blush at even the word blushing. This leads me to try and live a cerebral life and block out all references to bodies, male or female. Third, my only friend is a boy, but he was always so small as to throw off all judgments. Anxious adults routinely asked him the whereabouts of his mother when he was alone until embarrassingly recently. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly given the circumstances, not only is this a girls’ bathroom, but also this is an all-girls’ school. Sure, like most girls’ schools, we have a neighboring boys’ school, the brochures handed out at open houses extolling chaste brother-sister bonding, but it’s miles down the road and locked down tighter than boot camp since my brother Jeremy’s days of fun and frolic if rumor is to be believed. More accurately, if my half-sister is to be believed, since she and her cronies discuss these boys only slightly less often than they discuss the relative merits of various shades of eye shadow, which, let me tell you, are more numerous than the fish in the sea. Oh yeah, people have killed off most of the fish, so eye shadow definitely wins.
So back to these particular boys, there are two of them, one to either side in front of the evil one, like good little acolytes, whose name is of course Felicity in contempt of the fact that she is my anti-happiness, and they are sitting on the floor under the sink holding the rabbit, the only one that has hot water with any regularity, looking up at her and technically toward me. Given these conditions I am completely unable to pee, which will make the rest of my morning wretched, all squirms and urges that have to be concealed since I don’t have another break until after labs. Something must be done. I begin to howl. Anyone would expect this outburst to flummox Felicity, since I rarely speak but prefer to narrate my goings-on in my head like play-by-play football but with less action, but nothing fazes her, certainly nothing that I do.
“Oh, Harry, pipe down. Did someone flush your Kurt Cobain action figure?” Sarcastic Felicity is apparently as adorable as Smoking Felicity because the two dolts sigh in lovesickness.
And yes, it is Harry as in Harry Potter. When I was six and the first book came out, my brother started calling me Harry instead of Henny, and it somehow stuck. He claims now that it is because like Harry I am taking a while to realize my potential. My mother teaches dance, but she’s a huge reader, escaper of reality that she is, one of the things my family members have in common, and she thinks Harry Potter and JK Rowling are the best things to happen to children’s literature and literature in general in this century. Why, you ask? Because she got people reading again, that’s why. She says she was just right in naming me, too, because I’m going to come into my own just as Harry did. When I point out that Harry’s first name wasn’t really Henrietta and that I had already been alive and named years before it came out, not to mention that the boy wizard didn’t feel the need to hunch to avoid towering over lampposts, she just taps her head to remind me that I am superior to my body in every way, or at least this is clearly what she prays. My brother chimes in with the information that Harry Potter was already alive, too; the world just didn’t know it yet.
My mother, Imogene Gayle, both names at all times, please, used to dance with Twyla, as in Twyla Tharp for those of you not up on the world of modern dance, I’m sure it was the y’s that clinched it, and so the alumnae worship her, as does the administration. Such is Imogene Gayle’s boundless appeal that she adorns every admissions and fundraising brochure, a fact that must gall Mister and Missus Head and Finance (does he kiss her ass to get more fun or more funds?) to no end, more on them later. Imogene Gayle’s own body is her temple at which she prays daily, but mine is better forgotten about, certainly since to think about it would be to remind her that my body came from hers, a thought that clearly gives her the shudders. Shuddering dressed in fluttering tulle is a sight, I’ll tell you, one that you should envision as a cross between the sugarplum fairy on ecstasy and a willow tree in a hailstorm. Thank God with a capital G that she gave up any dance aspirations for me early on, probably in utero, where I surely clunked around instead of swam just as I do now. Imogene Gayle and I do not resemble mother and daughter in the traditional ways unless you count living in the same house.
My supposed father is the Head of School, big job that it is, so I almost never see him, though we live at the bottom of his driveway, more on that later, too. Not that I ever did, see him, I mean. I am the product of my mother and father’s last hurrah post-divorce, post-his-remarriage to the finance director imported to our beloved nation’s capital area from Texas to tighten things up around here (not his belt, obviously). Lenore Legrand, who surely must have been a hooker in a former or maybe even a present life to get a name like that, spruced my father right out of his tired old marriage to my mother and into a glorious one with her that produced Felicity double-quick. I am guessing that dear Mother used her pull over the school’s aura to rope him into giving her one more go-round for old times’ sake since my brother was already a teenager so her nest would soon be bare. I do have to guess though because Imogen Gayle’s lips are sealed. I sometimes fantasize that she had a wild in-your-face affair with some gorgeous red-headed Tall Man, because seriously anyone would be better than Ira, but I have no proof of that either. I further suppose that when Lenore the wicked stepmother, a category justly named despite its recent defenders, found out about me (nothing stays secret long at Barfmore, the crown jewel of rural Maryland), she chalked the transgression up to a transaction to settle old debts, though she wouldn’t have imagined it would pay such dividends as I aim to provide. Just like Missus Oates, yes, as in “sow your wild,” pronounced in Health, it only takes once.
“Trying to do my business here, Duplicity, if you don’t mind.”
“Like anyone cares, Henny Penny. Go ahead, go, and then get out of here.”
I angle my head over to the crack near the lock and arch one eyebrow at her where she can see me in the mirror. She cannot do this, and it infuriates her. “Why, planning on a foursome before math?”
She strokes the rabbit’s head as she’s speaking; clearly terrified, it gazes at her with the same flat glazed eyes as the two morons under the sink. I could tell her that rabbits don’t like starch, but what is the point, really? This is obviously some sort of prank, one that will only lead to insult for the rabbit and glory for Felicity in her followers’ eyes, like she needs any more, unless I intercede. “Crude, just like you. I should—”
|
