Read Online Lily's Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff - Free Book Online Page B

ship, wanting to know what had made him cry. Then she heard the church chimes.
    “It’s nine o’clock,” she said. “Gram is going to have a fit”
    They started to run, crossing the street diagonally, just missing an old Chevy with its headlights blackened, its horn blaring at them. They raced past Mrs. Sherman’s. “Same cookies,” Albert said, breathless, and then around the corner of the As Good As New Shoppe with the dusty hat and coat, the flute and the violin.
    By the time they reached the back road Lily had a pain in her chest and a stitch in her side, and Albert wasn’t crying anymore. They were both laughing, and he grabbed her hand and pulled her along until they reached her back door.
    “Tomorrow,” Lily called after him. “See you tomorrow.”
    “Yes,” he said, going down toward the Orbans’.
    She went into the house, thinking about tomorrow, thinking about asking him all the things she wanted to know.
    Gram was in the kitchen making iced tea, and she poured some for Lily. “I was just getting a little worried,” she said.
    “I was with Albert,” Lily said.
    Gram nodded at her. “Good. I’m glad.”
    Lily went into her bedroom with a glass of lukewarm iced tea and a sprig of mint from Mrs. Colgan’s Victory garden. She bent over to run her fingers across her mother’s stars pasted in a neat row, still thinking about tomorrow.

Chapter 13
    “ Y ou can’t wear those things,” Lily told him after they had fed the cat and were walking along the road. “I’m not going to march along the beach with someone who—”
    “You said you wanted to go out on the rocks,” Albert said.
    “Not with a baby who has beach slippers on his feet,” she told him, grinning.
    He grinned back, looking down at his feet. “My aunt said I would come back with cuts from the bar-
nack
les . . .”
    “
Barn
acles,” she said. “Not bar-
nack
les.”
    “Same thing.” He reached down to pull off Mr. Orban’s slippers and tossed them into the marshes.
    She nodded. “Don’t worry, they’ll still be there when we get back. Nobody in the world is going to want them.”
    She led him down the path, across the sand, toward the jetty, and began to hop along the rocks. “See,” she said, looking back. “Nothing to it.”
    He followed her slowly, one foot at a time, wincing.
    “Didn’t you ever walk around barefoot in Hungary?” she asked.
    “Certainly not,” he said. “Do you think we were poor, that we had no shoes?”
    She was laughing again, thinking about her feet, tough as leather, and Albert, his first summer going barefoot. She settled herself on the gray triangular rock, way out, with Albert next to her, the sun on her face, and the sound of the water lapping against the rocks.
    “I want to tell you something,” she said after a while. “I have stars on my bedroom ceiling. My mother pasted them all up for me when I was a baby. She told my father she was making a world for me. She said she wanted to give me the whole world.”
    Albert wasn’t looking at her, his head was turned, but he was sitting there so still, so unmoving, she knew how hard he was listening.
    “I bring one with me to Rockaway every year,” she said. “I counted. There are dozens of them left on my ceiling. I’ll be thirty or forty before they’re all used up.”
    He nodded a little.
    “I never told anyone,” she said. “Not even Poppy. I make them presents to me from my mother, every year on my birthday, in July.” She took a breath. It was so nice to tell someone about the stars. It was so nice to talk about her mother as if she, Lily, were like everyone else, like everyone who had a mother.
    “I know your mother is dead,” he said, looking at her now, reaching out for the tiniest second to touch her shoulder. “My aunt told me.”
    Lily squinted a little, looking out at a curl of smoke from a freighter far out. She waited for him to say something more about them, but when he didn’t she began again. “My