Library / Literature & Fiction

Who Cares? A Story of Adolescence
- Pages
- about 334
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 6.1 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
Birds called. Breezes played among branches just bursting into green.
Daffodils, proud and erect, stood in clumps about the dazzling lawn.
Young, pulsing, eager things elbowed their way through last year's
leaves to taste the morning sun; the wide-eyed celandine, yellower than
butter; the little violet, hugging the earth for fear of being seen;
the sturdy bourgeois daisy; the pale-faced anemone, earliest to wake
and earliest to sleep; the blue bird's-eye in small family groups; the
blatant dandelion already a head and shoulders taller than any
neighbor. Every twig in the old garden bore its new load of buds that
were soft as kittens' paws; and up the wrinkled trunks of ancient trees
young ivy leaves chased each other like school-boys.
Spring had come again, and its eternal spirit spread the message of
new-born hope, stirred the sap of awakening life, warmed the bosom of a
wintry earth and put into the hearts of birds the old desire to mate.
But the lonely girl turned a deaf ear to the call, and rounded her
shoulders over the elderly desk with tears blistering her letter.
"I'm miserable, miserable," she wrote. "There doesn't seem to be
anything to live for. I suppose it's selfish and horrid to grumble
because Mother has married again, but why did she choose the very
moment when she was to take me into life? Oh, Alice, what am I to do? I
feel like a rabbit with its foot in a trap, listening to the traffic on
the main road--like a newly fledged bird brought down with a broken
wing among the dead leaves of Rip Van Winkle's sleeping-place. You'll
laugh when you read this, and say that I'm dramatizing my feelings and
writing for effect; but if you've got any heart at all, you'd cry if
you saw me (me of all girls!
A short sample. Read the whole book
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