Read The Shadow of the Bear: A Fairy Tale Retold for Free Online Page B

looking at him. “I’m a junior.”
    “Would you go with Rob Tirsch if he asked you?”
    Rose’s heart almost stopped beating for a minute. Rob? She gave a faint gesture. “Probably,” she said at last, with feigned lightness.
    “Ooh,” Manny said, and moved back to say something to his friends, who all laughed.
    Probably? She had meant to say “maybe!” She moaned inwardly and crumpled her napkin. Nothing like looking desperate. She glanced around at the other girls, most of who hadn’t overheard Manny’s remarks, and shrugged.
    Inwardly she debated about asking Manny what he meant. He was probably just teasing her. Guys thought it was terribly funny when girls had a crush on one of them (Rose, apart from her own situation, found it pretty funny too, considering). Manny was no doubt looking for ammunition to tease Rob with.
    Her heart sank inside her. If Rob knew she liked him…how embarrassing! But he probably has some inkling already, Rose thought mournfully.
    She sighed and tried to join the conversation going on around her. I won’t say anything to Blanche about this unless something real happens , she decided.
     
    When two-thirty came, Rose bounded the steps to the south door to meet her sister. Blanche was already there, looking out, her petite figure almost overwhelmed by her black hair. Her books were held in front of her defensively as she gazed at the chain link fence at the other end of the parking lot. She looked upset again.
    “What’s wrong?” Rose asked worriedly.
    Blanche nodded with her head towards the fence. “That’s where I usually see him standing.”
    “Who?”
    “Bear. He wasn’t there today,” Blanche said.
    “Are you sure it was him the other times?” Rose glanced skeptically towards the fence, where Rob and a group of other guys were standing in clumps, talking.
    “I’m almost positive.” Blanche turned towards her sister, tossing her heavy curtain of hair back over her shoulders. “Rose, he really might be a drug dealer, for all his talk about poetry and whatnot.”
    “Can you picture Bear hanging out with people like those?” Rose asked derisively, mentally excluding Rob from that group.
    “I don’t know. There are a lot of contradictions in him,” Blanche admitted as they started to walk home.
    “Well,” Rose decided to be amiable, “who knows if we’ll ever even see him again?”

Chapter 3
     
    IT WAS ROSE’S turn to do the dishes that night, so while she and Mother chatted in the kitchen, Blanche slipped out to the living room to play the upright piano that stood in one corner against the wall. She used to practice all the time, but now only played occasionally as a way of consoling herself when she had a bad day. Dad had bought the piano for her and its worn walnut surfaces reminded her of him in a way that was distant enough to be comfortable. She pulled out her sheet music, spread it out in front of her, placed her hands on the keys and began.
    First, some scales. Then, Mozart’s “Rondo,” because it gave her fingers a good workout. Then the “Arabian Dance” from The Nutcracker Suite, a Chopin interlude she was learning, and Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
    She tried her hand at a new duet for piano and violin that Rose had gotten from her violin teacher. Back in the country, she and Rose had often played together for their family and friends. Rose still took violin lessons—now from a teacher at school—but Blanche had laid aside her study of piano, maybe for good. She ran quickly through the piano part of the new duet once, then put it aside and took out the “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven.
    From far off in the city came a car alarm, and the wailing warning of a police siren. Blanche shivered to herself and moved the bench closer to the piano. Fingers adjusted, she began to play the first bars of the “Moonlight Sonata” and let the notes murmur from her fingers in a ceaseless repetition that carried her away down a broad river in her