Lois Duncan - Written in the Stars

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 Societytwo dozen of my high school classmates who get together each month for lunch and to share the ups and downs of each others lives. You girls are just as important to me today as you were when I wrote these stories.

Contents

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?

Its hard to respond to that question other than to say, I dont have a reason. Its just what I do.

I cannot remember a time when I didnt 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.

Youll be blown up into the sky, the Moon Fairy would tell him. By the time you come down the world will be gone, so youll 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. Id hide there and read.

Or Id 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 mothers 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 Grimms 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 Mothers 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 trayDaddys 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 cant really mean for me to have this! Its yours! It belongs to you!

Indeed I do, Mother said decidedly. It represents a lot to me, honey. Ive 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. Thats hardly a milestone like sweet sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one. Seventeen really isnt 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 anyones heart, least of all Mothers. Mother and Daddy had one of the best marriages I had ever known. They always seemed to have fun together, no matter where they were or what they were doing. And they loved each other. You could tell it just by being around them. It wasnt the grabbing, hanging onto sort of love that kids our age experienced, it went deeper; it was the sort of love that made Mother say two years ago when Daddy died, Well, Ive had more happiness in my eighteen years of marriage than most women have in fifty.

Oh, it was broken, all right, Mother said lightly. And yours will be too, dear. Its inevitable. Then she kissed me.

I laughed, a little embarrassed, because were not usually a very demonstrative family. Besides, I wasnt quite sure what Mother was talking about. But I did love the locket. It was tiny and heart-shaped on a thin gold chain, and it was delicate and old-fashioned and lovely. I felt about it the way Mother did about her engagement ringMuch too valuable just to wear around. I wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in the corner of my top bureau drawer.