Written in the Stars - Lois Duncan

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      Written in

      the Stars

      

      Copyright © 2014 by Lois Duncan

      All rights reserved.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.

      Please direct inquiries to:

      Lizzie Skurnick Books

      an imprint of Ig Publishing

      392 Clinton Avenue #1S

      Brooklyn, NY 11238

       www.igpub.com

      ISBN: 978-1-939601-21-6 (ebook)

      For “The Sea Horse Society”—two dozen of my high school classmates who get together each month for lunch and to share the ups and downs of each other’s lives. You “girls” are just as important to me today as you were when I wrote these stories.

       Contents

       The Corner

       Bruce McCown’s Sister

       Stop Calling Me Baby

       The Reason

       The Silver Bracelet

       Detestable Dale

       April

       Time To Find Out

       The Lost Christmas

       The Last Night

      Prologue

      I often hear from young readers who are working on author reports, and the question they ask most often is “Why do you write?”

      It’s hard to respond to that question other than to say, “I don’t have a reason. It’s just what I do.”

      I cannot remember a time when I didn’t consider myself a writer. When I was three years old I was dictating stories to my parents, and as soon as I learned to print, I was setting them on paper. I shared a room with my younger brother, and at night I would lie in bed inventing tales to give him nightmares. I would pretend to be the “Moon Fairy,” come to deliver the message that the moon was falling toward the earth.

      “And what will happen to me?” Billy would ask in his quavering little voice.

      “You’ll be blown up into the sky,” the Moon Fairy would tell him. “By the time you come down the world will be gone, so you’ll just keep falling forever.”

      “With no breakfast?” poor Billy would scream hysterically.

      Eventually, our parents had the good sense to put us in separate rooms.

      Aside from tormenting Billy, I had few hobbies. A plump, shy little girl, I was a bookworm and a dreamer. I grew up in Sarasota, Florida, and spent a lot of my time playing alone in the woods and on the beaches. I had a secret hideaway in the middle of a bamboo clump. I would bend the bamboo until I could straddle it, and then it would spring up, and I would slide down into the hollow at its heart with green stalks all around me and leaves like lace against my face. I’d hide there and read.

      Or I’d ride my bicycle. I would pedal for miles along the beach road with the wind blowing in my face and the sun hot on my hair. There was a special point where I turned the bike off the road and walked it down a little path between the dunes. I parked it there and lay on my back in the sand and listened to the waves crash against the rocks and dreamed up stories.

      Then I would go home and write them, pecking them out with two fingers on my mother’s manual typewriter. When I was ten I started shipping them off to magazines that I found on my parents’ coffee table. Those submissions were quickly returned, and I finally realized that I was choosing the wrong publications. The stories I was writing were about issues that would be of interest only to readers my own age, so I changed my strategy and began to send them to youth publications such as American Girl, Senior Prom and Seventeen.

      At age thirteen, I finally made my first sale. Seeing my byline positioned beneath the title of a story that I had created was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.

      From that point on there was no turning back. Or, perhaps, there had never been a time when I could turn back.

      For me, a life as a writer was “written in the stars.”

      Written in

      the Stars

      Ever since I was very little, I knew that someday my prince would come. At first I used to envision him riding up on a snow-white horse to scoop me up and carry me away to his castle. This changed, of course, as I grew older and my reading matter progressed from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to Romeo and Juliet. I did away with the horse by the time I was eleven, but the rest of the belief remained, a quiet certainty deep inside of me. Somewhere in the world there was The One, the special One, looking for me just as I was looking for him, and someday he would come. It was written in the stars.

      I never talked about it much, except once in a while to Mother. I dated just as the other girls did, strings of silly, uninteresting boys, just to kill time until The One arrived. And then, when I was seventeen, two things happened. Mother gave me the locket, and I realized who The One was. Ted Bennington.

      When I opened the little white package on my seventeenth birthday and saw the locket, I was flabbergasted. The locket was not a new purchase; I had seen it often before. In fact, every time I rummaged through Mother’s jewelry box to borrow a pair of earrings or a bracelet or something, I saw it, not in the jumble of everyday jewelry but in the separate little tray where she kept all the things Daddy had given her. There was the whole story of a romance in that tray—Daddy’s track medals from college and his fraternity pin, the pearls he gave Mother on their wedding day and the silver pin from their fifteenth anniversary and the silver bars he wore when he was in the Navy during the war. And in the midst of all those things was the locket.

      “But, Mother,” I protested, holding it up in amazement, “you can’t really mean for me to have this! It’s yours! It belongs to you!”

      “Indeed I do,” Mother said decidedly. “It represents a lot to me, honey. I’ve always said that my daughter would have it when she turned seventeen.” There was a faraway look in her eyes.

      “But why seventeen?” I asked. “That’s hardly a milestone like sweet sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one. Seventeen really isn’t anything.”

      “It was to me,” Mother said. “It was the age of heartbreak.”

      I stared at her in disbelief. “Your heart was never broken!”

      It was impossible to imagine Daddy, with his warm gray eyes and gentle smile, ever breaking anyone’s heart, least of all Mother’s. Mother and Daddy had one of the best marriages I had ever known. They always seemed to have fun together, no matter

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