Page 110 of Fated

The watch sounds, reverberating through the stillness?—

Tick,

Tick,

Tick,

—and I fall into the inviting, wide-open warmth of my dreams.

“Mom! Wake up! Mom!”

I blink, bleary-eyed into the bright, sun-studded light of the island. Amy perches on the bed above me, grasping my shoulders and shaking.

“What? Who?” I shake my head and clear away the cobwebs of Geneva.

Amy grins down at me. Her cheeks are still baby-fat round and her hair bounces around her as she springs up and down on the bed.

“What do you mean, what?” she asks, jostling the bed. The tiny room isn’t big enough for her vibrant morning exuberance.

I sit up and blink at her. “You want banana pancakes?”

“Please, no,” she says, pretending to cross herself. “You turned me off those for life.”

I climb out of bed, step onto the warm, worn wood, and take three steps to the plastic clothesline. I pull off a sea-blue dress with tassels and ruffles.

“You won’t need that. It’s Saturday!”

I look back at Amy. “Sorry?”

“You forgot.” She grins.

“I forgot,” I agree. Or, in reality, I had no idea in the first place. Hopefully, the other Becca, the dream Becca who wreaks havoc when I’m not around, hasn’t gotten me into a terrible fix.

“Dad’s teaching you to swim today!” She says this with so much relish and zeal that I can only blink in confusion.

“Sorry?”

She pulls open the dresser and grabs a cherry-red bikini. She thrusts it at me. “You. Dad. The beach. Swimming lessons!”

“Why are you excited about this?”

Amy shrugs and turns to the side, hiding her expression. She pushes aside dresses and swim cover-ups, looking for something, and says, “Because last night you said all I ever do is read, that I’m a bookworm—like that’s a bad thing—and I should expand myself and try new things. And I said, I’d try new things if you try new things, like swimming. And so I agreed to take Sean and go make baskets with Grandma—a new thing—as long as you go and learn to swim.”

She pushes her curls back from her face and grins at me, completely satisfied with the arrangement. Even so, I don’t especially like how my chest pinched when she mentioned that I said “all you ever do is read.” She had a breezy, unaffected voice covering something that sounded an awful lot like hurt.

Amy’s confident. She’s one of the most confident fourteen-year-olds I’ve ever met. But even so, if your mum doesn’t approve of you, it hurts. If you’re confident, you might hide it better, but it still hurts.

“Amy,” I say, and she turns and thrusts a white swim cover-up at me.

“You’re going to finally have swim lessons. Dad’s a terror as a swim coach. All us kids hated swim lessons, he’s like a drill sergeant.” She puts on a deep voice, “Tread for three minutes. Tread! No touching! This is an important life skill! Tread!”

“Amy.”

She looks at me then, her eyebrows pulling down. “What?”

I take the bikini and the cover-up. “It’s all right if you love to read. It’s all right if that’s how you want to spend your time. It’s okay to just be you. To do whatever brings you joy. You shouldn’t ever let anyone take your joy from you. Not even me.”

Her cheeks turn pink and she looks to the side, out the window toward the bleached sky. “I know.” She looks back at me then, a glint in her eyes. “‘To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.’ That’s Dostoevsky.”

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