Read Chocolates for Breakfast for Free Online Page B

them?”
    â€œOf Mummy, yes.”
    He was making notations so steadily that Courtney hardly noticed.
    â€œBeing so far away from your mother,” he said, “I suppose you get homesick—think about California.”
    â€œNo,” Courtney answered. “I’m never homesick.” She looked out the window. “I daydream a lot though,” she said. “When it’s nice weather like now, I go out to the hockey field and lie in the grass and daydream, and in the evenings I used to go into the chapel.” She leaned forward. “You know, in a corner of the quadrangle there’s a big rabbit’s burrow. Used by whole generations of rabbits, I suppose. Anyhow, it’s very big and I can fit in there under the brush, and it’s as though there’s no one around but me in that rabbit’s burrow, as though the school buildings and all the people weren’t there at all.”
    It sounded kind of silly to talk about a rabbit’s burrow, she thought. She would have told him about the place on Mrs. Reese’s grounds where the boxwoods were all around, and there was a little path that she had discovered one day that seemed as though nobody had used it in about fifty years, it was that faint. She followed it in and pushed aside the boxwood, and inside she found a little cracked marble bench, that also looked as though it hadn’t been used in about fifty years. So she went in and sat on the little marble bench in that secret place all hidden by the boxwoods, and liked the thought that probably nobody around Scaisbrooke now even knew it was there. When she left her secret place, she brushed the snow over her footprints, so that the gardeners wouldn’t follow them and find the cracked marble bench. That place was her favorite in the winter, but in the spring and fall she liked the rabbit’s burrow best. Crazy, a rabbit’s burrow. She ought to talk about more adult things to this man. She couldn’t tell him about the boxwood place anyway, because it was off bounds and Mrs. Forrest was there.
    â€œWhat are your daydreams like?” he asked casually.
    That one made her stop and think. What were they like? What ran through her mind when she sat in a secret place and imagined? She thought a lot of silly things about Miss Rosen, like having dinner with her in New York and wild things like that, but she couldn’t tell him that because Mrs. Forrest was there. Anyway, she didn’t think about that much any more, because she only thought about things that might conceivably happen. Courtney was a very practical girl.
    She put her hand up to the lapel of her blazer and pulled at it while she tried to remember, then she stopped that because it was an ill-at-ease gesture and she had to be charming.
    â€œWell,” she said uncomfortably. “I guess I think about people I know, as though I were with them and talking to them.” She thought about the way she pretended she was talking to Al Leone when she was confused, and how the matter-of-fact answers that he would give helped her to think clearer.
    â€œDo you just think these conversations, or do they seem real?”
    â€œOh, they seem awfully real,” she said intensely. “Sure, the people talk just as they always do, with the inflections and all that. They don’t just talk like me or something,” she said scornfully.
    â€œSo it’s almost as though they were there?”
    â€œYes, it’s really as though they were there, except I know they aren’t, although I have a picture of them in my mind so I can see their faces and their expressions.”
    Mrs. Forrest sat forward incredulously, and then remembered that she should show no reaction, like the doctor, and sat back.
    â€œWell, we all have daydreams,” the doctor said absently as he wrote. “Yours are very vivid.”
    Courtney nodded. This was an accepted fact, and there was nothing remarkable about her