Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,2

had friends with mothers that age and older, and they still seemed young and full of life. Emma looked like an old woman. Harry had just turned fifty and seemed even older. Maggie had thought her father was so glamorous, and her mother had been pretty when he was alive, but she wasn’t anymore. She didn’t seem to care, and Harry didn’t either. He was a devoted husband, responsible, and accepted her as she was. She talked about going back to nursing sometimes but it had been too many years and the hours were too long, so she took menial jobs instead.

Maggie dreamed of going back to Florida when she finished high school. She missed the warm weather and the friends she’d made there. Moving to another town as a civilian wasn’t like moving to another base in the Air Force. In the military there were always people to welcome you and make you feel at home. In civilian life, no one made it easier for you. You had to figure it out on your own, and meet new friends in a new school. And most of the girls were mean.

When Maggie turned seventeen after they moved to Chicago and started her senior year in high school, she ate lunch alone in the cafeteria every day. She hadn’t made it into the clique of popular girls, and didn’t want to. None of the boys noticed her. She didn’t care about them either. Her grades were okay, but she didn’t like her new school. She hardly knew her teachers. They’d never tried to get to know her. She was planning to go to a state college when she graduated, and didn’t know what she wanted to study yet. Her mother had gotten her a summer job as a waitress at the hotel. She hated it, but she had no idea what else to do. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go to college, but her mother said that her father would have expected it of her, so she felt she had no choice.

Maggie was leaving school one day, when someone flashed past her. She could feel the wind rush by her face. He would have knocked her down if he’d come any closer, but he was careful not to. She wasn’t even sure who or what it was. When she turned around and looked, it was a boy on a skateboard, moving at full speed. He glanced back and waved at her. She hadn’t seen a smile as dazzling as that since her father. He was tall like Kevin too, with sandy blond hair, and she thought he had blue eyes when he looked back at her. He was wearing a knit cap pulled down in the chilly autumn breeze. She was going to yell at him to watch out when he flew past her, but she didn’t have time to. He was still smiling as he went around the corner and disappeared. He had frightened her for a minute, and then she went to meet Tommy at their bus stop to go home, and she forgot about the boy on the skateboard. She saw him again a few days later, on his way to school. He got off the board and carried it the last block to school, and came up alongside her.

“You’re not supposed to skate on the sidewalk,” she scolded him.

“I don’t. I was just saying hi to you,” he said with that enormous smile that started in his eyes and transformed his whole face. He had bright blue eyes and an aura of boyish innocence.

“You almost knocked me down.” She frowned. She didn’t know what else to say to him. She hadn’t dated any boys yet. The girls in her class were much cooler than she was. She was an innocent compared to them. At seventeen she’d only kissed a boy once. He’d been drunk at a school dance and she’d run away from him. He scared her.

“I didn’t almost knock you down,” the boy said clearly. “I wouldn’t do that. I’ve been watching you. Are you new at school?” He was curious about her and seemed more confident than she was. Her palms were sweating while she talked to him and tried to look indifferent.

“I was, last year. We moved here in April, from Miami.”

He whistled. “Wow. Big change. The weather, if nothing else.”

“The school too,” she admitted. He had noticed her keeping to herself, away from the other girls. It was