Moon Shadow: The Totally True Love Adventure Series (Volume 1)
Copyright © 2015 R.L. Fox
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Interior and Cover Design: Creative Publishing Book Design
For Martha and Glenn
Contents
A
riddle: Sometimes I’m taken lightly and sometimes darkly. Most everyone wants to embrace my wonders, but only a happy few ever have.
What am I?
Life would be very different without me—perhaps nonexistent. Human survival depends on me. I’m capable of permanently changing lives; as I move dangerously close, I bring with me the power over life and death.
If you haven’t yet solved the riddle, here’s a final clue: When I show up in full splendor, people tend to behave strangely. Still don’t have the answer? Read on. By the way, if you think you have the correct answer, the one that seems obvious, you’re in for a surprise
Sarah
Friday afternoon, July 25
Coronado Island, California
I
don’t know if I’ll ever be free of my mother’s restrictions, at least that’s the way it seems. If I was, I don’t know that I’d always know what to do. Sometimes I feel as if I can do anything or change into anything. I imagine that I could just turn into a bird, like Manny, my Amazon gray parrot, and fly away. If I could fly away, away from myself, I would never have to make decisions again, never have to listen to anyone. Never again would anyone’s words cause me pain.
Now that I’ve lost my best friend I figure it’s definitely time to ask my mother about her mystery man and the fling she’s having, if that’s what it amounts to. Everyone at school has been talking behind my back, but I know what they’re saying—totally.
As I walk slowly along D Avenue, towards home, the treetops cast their smooth shadows, shaped like Egyptian pyramids on the white sidewalks and well-kept lawns. I pass by a live oak with leaves that are almost transparent in the bright sun. Here the lawns are immaculate, avocado green and magically untainted by fallen leaves. The houses are lavish (I love the sound of that word) and enormous, in a mixture of styles: ranch, Cape Cod, and Victorian, like ours.
I can hardly believe that my loving, dependable, predictable old fashioned mother is having a secret affair. Maybe it has something to do with the moon. People have been acting so crazy lately. Anyway, I feel betrayed. Mom is seriously messing up my life. But there’s hope, so I’ve been praying that it’s real love. Only love will save me, because there’s something missing from my life: a man. Not a man for me, but for my mother. Then we can do all the dumb normal stuff real families do.
I’ve also been hoping that my dad (with whom I sometimes speak on the other side) will understand. It’s all right to wonder what kind of man my mom is going for, because inside I know my dad will forgive us. It doesn’t mean we’ll ever stop loving
him
. We just need someone after all this time alone, that’s all.
Sometimes it seems as if my dad is talking to me in whispers from the other side, usually on windy days when I can barely hear him through the rustling of the leaves in the trees. But I can hear him, I’m sure of it. Maybe my dad has taken spirit in the wind. After he died, I thought I couldn’t live without him. Well, I told myself, you have a choice: to be happy or sad. I chose to be happy.
And I
am
happy most of the time, but today sadness has descended upon me. I brush a tear from my cheek, wiping it on my denim skirt. With the Ralph Lauren skirt, knee length, I’m wearing a white crew neck top, white ankle socks and my most colorful sneakers.
I have to stop crying because my nose is starting to run and I don’t have a tissue. Stop that, I order my brain. There’s no use in crying. But it’s hard to stop the tears when my dad isn’t here to hug me, and when just minutes ago I found out my best friend has dumped me because of my supposed slutty mother.
Duh, it’s not as if I shouldn’t have seen it coming, after having been tricked and made the gimp at Beth Miller’s slumber party Saturday night. I should have known there was something funny about Beth and her cool friends inviting “Baby Sarah” (me) and my best friend, Ashley, to their party. Then when they wanted me to hide underneath the bed before Ashley got there, so they could surprise Ashley after telling her I wasn’t coming to the party, well, I sure did fall for that one. How was I to know that while I was hiding they would tell Ashley about my mother’s fling, and that Ashley would call my mother a slut?
I haven’t spoken to Ashley all week. It was Beth Miller who stopped me today before chorus (cancelled because Ms. Wyatt is ill) and gave me the folded square of lined paper, the note from Ashley. When I read all about how Ashley couldn’t be my best friend any longer, and how Ashley had asked Beth to do homework with her tonight and spend the night this weekend, I’d become red-faced angry. Ashley also said in the note: “I would invite you, too, Sarah, except that you’ll probably grow up to be a slut just like your mother.” She’ll probably post something totally lame about it on her stupid Facebook page.
The part about losing Ashley really hurts, worse than Saturday night, because at least then I was worried only about crying in front of the others after hearing that my mother was having a secret affair. Losing Ashley as my best friend hurts so much I can’t feel mad anymore. I waited until I left the school grounds before starting to cry.
Ashley and I have been friends for a long time, ever since she moved to the Island when we were starting the sixth grade. Since I have no brothers or sisters, I was feeling like a freak in the neighborhood. Then Ashley came along and I gave up playing beauty parlor with my Barbie dolls.
When Ashley and I started the seventh grade we decided that we would marry two handsome brothers, twins, when we grew up, and then we’d get pregnant at exactly the same time and our chests would grow bigger. Ashley told me you don’t even have to be pregnant to make your chest bigger. You can just talk to it a lot, saying “grow, grow.”
But whom is Ashley calling a floozy now? Unlike her, I’m probably the only tenth-grade girl on the planet who hasn’t even been kissed. At Beth’s birthday party last year when we played spin-the-bottle in the game room I turned away from Bobby as he tried to kiss me on the lips, while Ashley, and Beth, went right ahead and got kissed when it was their turns. They thought it was just so cool when Crystal Navarro told us her story about being fondled by a hot guitarist in a metal band, a senior at Coronado High. How can Ashley accuse
me
just because my mother has a boyfriend? And why should
that
qualify my mother as a floozy and me as a future floozy?
Is Ashley doing this because she and Beth really do think of me as childish and immature, not cool enough? They’re always commenting about how I get all emo and how I’m such a prep. And after all, they have their own cell phones and my mom won’t allow me to have one until I turn fifteen and a half. It’s like my mother thinks I need my learner’s permit before I can operate a cell phone.
Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t begun to get my period yet like Ashley and Beth and everyone else. They ridiculed me for days after Mr. Bascom read to the class my Mother’s Day essay, “What Motherhood Means to Me.” I’d written, “Being a mother is the most important responsibility in the world. The miracle of having a baby, of giving life to another human being, is God’s most precious gift to women; it’s the most wonderful experience possible in His universe ...”
Then Beth said to me after class, while Ashley and a lot of other people, including boys, stood nearby, “What would
you
know about motherhood? You haven’t even got your period yet. Maybe you never will, did you ever think about that?”
Since then I’ve been wondering if something might be wrong with me. I went to the public library and read everything I could find on the menstrual cycle. For a while I even imagined having a congenital defect of some kind, like not possessing a uterus. I opened my bedroom curtains at night and slept in the back yard when there was a full moon, hoping the moonlight would help get things started.
My mother took me to her gynecologist who said everything looks normal, that the cause of the delay is probably emotional and don’t worry, it should happen soon. But perhaps it’s only that God is punishing me, for unclean thoughts. I
do
want to be kissed, French-kissed, although not by just anybody, like Bobby. Is that a sin?
I know I’m pretty, yet all through the ninth and now tenth grade the cutest boys have completely ignored me. It seems I’m too tall (five eight and three quarters), taller than most of the boys in the tenth grade.
Suddenly I stop walking as I have an epiphany: What if boys don’t think I’m sexy because I don’t think of
myself
as sexy? Obviously I don’t have wild and crazy adventures like Ashley and Beth because I never open myself up to them. The truth is that I’ve yet to step outside the box. I’ve been a circle of banality, fifteen years around. I’ve lived my entire life guided along by my mother (until this affair of hers), in the same boring and predictable way as every other Coronado Island WASPy rich bitch adolescent, and it’s my own fault.