Read Kelly McClymer-Must Love Black for Free Online Page A

against the wall with all my posters and the window that looked out on the tree my mom and I had planted one day when the local tree huggers were giving out seedlings. I’d wanted to plant as many as my chubby little hands could hold, but Mom explained that trees needed space and sun to grow big, and it wouldn’t be good to crowd them.
    There was a window in this room, too. I moved the curtain aside and squinted. Thick fog pressed against the glass.
    The window opened smoothly. It didn’t have a screen, so I could stick my head out into the fog. It was cool and dampon my face. The quiet of the house was eased by the sound of the sea and the wind.
    I climbed into bed, watching the curtains flap in the breeze, wondering what the outside would look like in the daytime, when the fog had burned off. I left the window open but didn’t turn my back to it when I curled up.
    Teacups, commence your whirling. I flipped the pages of my mother’s book with my thumb, enjoying the sound and feel of the page edges too much to stop.
    The box that held two dozen copies of Mom’s new book came the day of her funeral. I took one to throw in the grave. The funeral director shooed me away, because I was only nine. I’d had to wait until he was turned away, whispering to my Dad, to drop it dead center on the shiny brown casket. For a moment, the woman on the cover seemed to look at me as if she disapproved of being buried alive when all she was trying to do was escape the menace of the dark and brooding stone manor behind her, but then the book slid down the shiny hump of the casket and tucked itself between the sharp wall of dirt and the glossy glorified box.
    Mom said once, when I was squishing the soap bubbles up between my fingers carefully so my hands would be clean enough to pat the pages, that a writer puts all her best lines in her first book. That if you read a writer’s first book, you’ll know who she is. She said that’s why a lot of writers can’t get their first books published—or don’t even try. Because they don’t want to edit themselves out, as much as they need to. She said that was silly, because when you edit a lot of yourself out, the best remains and shines through.
    I didn’t pay attention then because she was my mom and I was just a kid and she was alive. But now I know what she meant. Whenever I’m not sure what to do, I check her book for advice. I’ve never told anyone this, because it’s no one else’s business. Besides, it’s not like anyone else cares what she had to say in her first and last novel,
Manor of Dark Dreams.
The book came out, Dad and I drove to the store and took pictures in front of it on the bookshelf, and then it disappeared. She was working on another book she called
Manor of Dark Hope,
but it died with her since the only copy was on her laptop, which got destroyed in the crash.
    Whenever I need to hear what my mom would have said, I close my eyes and stick my finger somewhere on the page and read. It may sound twisted, but I swear she hasn’t ever let me down. She really did put all the best of herself in that book. I’d used it a lot when I was little—right through freshman year, when the advice kept me from betraying Sarah over some guy who was cuter than sin and liked to play girls as if we were stones he could pick up and skip across a pond. He didn’t concern himself with the ripples, of course. Still didn’t, as of the end of junior year. But Sarah and I had avoided being rippled apart by his electric smile and careless ways.
    Close call, though, and I’m not sure I’d have understood the right thing to do if I hadn’t read my mom’s wise words (page 29, second paragraph):
    Friendship is a choice. More to the point, it is a series of ongoing choices, with consequences for each person. And thus I decided that Iwould not speak of Arabella’s hoarding of the dinner rolls. As her nanny I could not precisely be her friend, but neither did I need to be her enemy.
    When