Read Online Surprise Me by Deena Goldstone - Free Book Online Page A

suddenly I knew I was getting heatstroke!”
    “Ruth.” Eli’s tone an admonishment to his wife, which she ignores.
    “The problem is they don’t have any other place to hold graduation,” Isabelle explains.
    “Well, could they have handed out water or hats or something?”
    “I’m so sorry,” Isabelle says again, as if the heat and the amphitheater, the lack of water and hats, were all her fault.
    “Isabelle was sitting in the same heat as you, only in that long black robe, which must have upped her internal temperature at least ten more degrees.”
    “So it doesn’t matter what I was feeling? Is that what you’re saying?”
    Isabelle and Aaron exchange a look: Here they go. The twins melt into the crowd. They don’t want to witness what they’ve seen countless times before: their parents, with over twenty years of resentment built up, going at each other until her mother starts to cry and her father apologizes.

    “Of course that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that today is Isabelle’s day and you should have—”
    “What? Died? Because it’s her day?”
    “Mommy, nobody said that.”
    “Your father did—I just heard him.”
    “Ruth, that is not at all what I said.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with my ears!”
    “Why do you persist in attributing to me things I never said, things I never in a million years would say?”
    And they’re off. Only today Isabelle can’t take it. Isn’t it possible to put all this aside for one day? Her day. The day she’s so happy. Do they have to ruin it? Well, she won’t let them. She’ll flee the train wreck piling up in front of her. It feels very daring.
    “When they stop fighting,” she says to Aaron, “tell them I’ll see you all later at the hotel.”
    “You can’t leave.” Aaron is panicked. “It’ll only get worse if you leave.”
    “See those steps over there, the ones in the shade? Go sit there and wait it out.”
    Aaron doesn’t move. He looks wretched.
    “I have a paper to turn in, A.”
    “Can I come with you?”
    “Not this time. I’ll see you later, okay?”
    There’s no way out for him. Not now, not for another year, until he goes away to college and never comes back. “Okay,” he says finally, and Isabelle is gone, swallowed up by the crowd.
    She pushes the guilt down, away, away from her just for today as she weaves through the milling families, recognizing somewhere inside her that she made the decision to leave without any of her habitual agonizing. Should she have stayed and mediated her parents’ argument? Should she have tried harder to head it off? Should she have stayed to protect Aaron, as she has countless times before? Should she have been a better daughter? Those questions would have trapped her into indecision if not for Daniel, who is waiting for her.

    And then her eye is caught by a swirl of primary colors shimmering in the heat: Deepti’s extended family—her mother in a rose-colored sari shot through with gold thread, her older sister in shades of green and blue, Aunt Priya, the doctor, dressed in bright yellow silk. And in the middle, startling in contrast, is Deepti in her long black gown and tasseled cap. Her father, Ajay, stands proudly on the periphery of all these colorful women in his woven sandals and starched ocher shirt, content to watch them flutter around his beaming daughter.
    “Isabelle!” Deepti calls to her, and the two roommates embrace. “We did it!”
    “We did!” And suddenly, in that split second, Isabelle is overcome with a sense of loss. “I’m going to miss you so much!”
    “I know. I know!”
    “I won’t see you every day. How can that be?”
    “You’ll visit me in the Bay Area. Promise me?”
    “Of course I promise,” Isabelle says, because she wants it to be true—that she will take a trip to San Francisco sometime soon, even though the days and weeks past graduation are a fuzzy blur to her now.
    And then she spots Nate and his parents and