Chapter 1
When Annie Velter woke up, she just knew it was the best kind of morning.
It was the first day of summer vacation. Until Labor Day rolled by, Annie would have no homework to do. Not one bit for months and months and months.
Annie should have finished school on June 16, but because of foul weather, she was stuck there until June 25.
“When I was a kid,” her father would say every time it snowed more than 6 inches, and the school closures were announced on the six a.m. news, “we would never have stayed home for this. People are such wimps now.”
Chapter 2
Gam looked like an older version of Mom. They both had the same almost black hair that ran past their shoulders, and light green eyes. Gam’s eyes were rounder, and Mom’s pinched a bit as if she always had a thoughtful question to ask. Mom must gotten her father’s eyes, but Annie didn’t know what Grand-dad had looked like. He died when she was a baby, and Mom was never one for putting family pictures on the walls. Most of her pictures of Annie were still trapped in her digital camera, or on a flash card somewhere in her desk.
Chapter 3
Annie ran back to her room. She heard William open his door just as she closed hers, and she froze, not sure whether to confront him or pretend she was still asleep. But he did not come her way, and then she heard the faint sound of the apartment door closing.
Outside, William appeared on the sidewalk, then walked to the subway and disappeared.
How would that help him find Gam?
Chapter 4
Even though she was still very tired, Annie couldn’t fall asleep until after midnight (according to Gam’s old fashioned alarm clock with two bells on the top), and when she did drop off, the sounds of people talking outside, and noisy trash trucks on the narrow Parisian streets kept waking her up.
But for some strange reason, once she saw it was getting light outside, Annie started to sleep soundly, and didn’t wake up again until 10 am.
When she woke up, the little white fish was back in the aquarium, and floating beside a similar fish that was larger, but still a lot smaller than all the other fish in the tank.
