Isabelle E-Book

Nayah Brooke

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

They meet on the riverbank. 

Eric is a young boy when he first sees her. They soon become friends, and he considers her his closest companion, perhaps even more. 

But then tragedy strikes,

and he is left standing with a wilted bouquet of poppies.

Leseprobe

Nayah Brooke

Isabelle

Dedicated to Katie Haus, my museBookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

one

When I think of Isabelle, two words come to mind- piano and summer.

I think of piano, because she could play the instrument like it was second nature. When she played, the world grew quiet, the trees swayed to her music. When she played, the notes came alive. They danced. After she finished, the notes lingered in the air, the room filled with hushed silence. She created poetry out of music, and I could sit for hours, listening.

I think of summer, because it was the only time I could see Isabelle. We first met on the riverbank near my house, where crickets chirped and frogs croaked ceaselessly. I was sitting on a large boulder with my feet dipped in the swirling water, crying because my tooth had fallen out. She suddenly sat down next to me and showed me the wildflowers she’d picked. Bewildered, I stared at her, my tooth forgotten. 

“Look, aren’t they really pretty? I can put some in your hair,” she said. “You can choose which ones you want.” She held her handful of flowers towards me, a proud smile on her face. I pulled away and frowned.

“Flowers are for girls,” I said, wiping my face with my sleeve. The girl stared at me for a long moment, her hands still outstretched.

“Flowers are for everyone,” she said. “What about the yellow one? My mommy told me it’s called a dandelion. Or the pink one? I like pink.”

“Well, I like red,” I replied. She picked up a red flower with big petals. 

“Then this one.”

“That one looks like paper,” I complained, but didn’t pull away when she reached for my head.

“What’s your name?” she asked, fighting my unbrushed curls.

“Eric. What’s yours?”

“Isabelle.” She smiled at me.

 We became best friends thereafter. 

She visited every summer because her grandparents lived next to my family. I taught her to skip stones. She tried to teach me how to play the piano. We built sand castles and had tea parties. We climbed trees and counted stars. We learned together how to ride a bike. To me, her arrival signaled the beginning of summer, and her departure the end. 

As years passed I slowly began to notice the way her eyes looked brown in the shade and golden in the sunlight. I noticed the way she twisted her ring on her index finger when she got nervous, the dimple that appeared on her left cheek when she laughed. I wondered if she noticed little things about me too. 

I knew everything about her, the things she loved and the things she hated. I didn’t even have to try to memorize them. They just somehow stuck. Perhaps it was because she was my best friend. 

Her favorite weather was when it was pouring. She liked to stare out the window at the rain that pattered on the glass, watching the dark stormy clouds that lit up occasionally with lightning. At those times, she was in her own little world. I was content just sitting there with her, neither of us speaking. 

Her favorite flowers were poppies. I never really liked them. The petals were so thin and fragile that it looked like it would blow away in the wind. She never told me why she liked them. Whenever I asked, she would simply smile and change the subject. But whenever she put them in her hair, it looked pretty. Maybe it was the contrast between the red petals and the dark hair. Maybe it was something else entirely.