Here's a little taster of The Paper Doll Summer.
Chapter 1: Izzy
Izzy liked to make paper dolls. Ones that were already dressed, not the sort with no clothes on that you’d dress in paper clothes. Izzy made her paper dolls in families, and wrote their names and ages on the backs. All the paper doll parents had their first children when they were thirty years old, so it was easy to figure out everyone’s ages.
Some of the paper doll families had two moms and some had two dads. Some had twins and some had tiny babies. Everyone the same age was the same height, and all the grown-ups were as tall as each other. None of them were grandparents, which was perhaps surprising considering how much Izzy loved her grandmother.
She took her paper doll supplies with her when she packed to go to Aunt Sarah and Gam’s.
“I think the best thing would be for you to go and stay with your aunt and your grandmother for the summer,” Mom had said, after she’d come home from work and taken a shower and changed all her clothes. “It’ll be good for you to be out of the city, with the virus running rampant here.”
“Even the playground’s closed,” Izzy said, thinking of the trailing yellow tape that now surrounded the swings and slide at the end of their block. At nearly twelve, she was starting to feel too old for the playground, anyway. “And I can’t go to Ellie’s apartment and she can’t come here.” That went for all her other friends as well.
“It’ll be much safer there, out of the crowds in the city, and there’ll be more for you to do.” Mom didn’t say what there would be to do, exactly, but it was clear she thought that a big house with a front and back yard would automatically provide more ways for Izzy to entertain herself than their small apartment could. “And I’m going to be working on the intensive care ward.”
“You are? I didn’t know.” Izzy wondered how worried she should be about that.
“Richard will be here, of course,” Mom continued. Richard was Izzy’s stepdad. “But it will be distracting for him to work from home with you moping about at a loose end, not even online school to keep you occupied. On the whole,” she went on, though Izzy could see she was mostly talking to herself now, “this is the best solution.”
Izzy let the “moping” comment slide, because it was mostly true.
“I wanted to warn you, Gam’s memory isn’t what it used to be,” Mom added.
Izzy didn’t pay much attention to that. Gam and Aunt Sarah’s house and its people were like Christmas: always the same, no matter how much taller Izzy had grown since the last time. Other people’s grandparents might become frail and old, but Gam was unchanging: an immovable boulder in the swirling river of time.
She chewed over the idea, which had been suggested a few times before as the spring had worn on with no end in sight to the pandemic. The city was eerie and a bit scary at the moment, with so many things closed and people wearing masks and trying to stand far apart in places where nobody had ever stood far apart before and there was no room for such a thing. Being somewhere else, where Gam was, would be quite nice, probably.
***
Some distance away, there was a ghost who swooped and dived in a tall house. She disappeared and reformed, feeling all the time vaguely dissatisfied and powerless. Vaguely was the way she’d experienced all her feelings for a long time now, because she’d been a ghost for many years. Emotions came and went like summer breezes, nothing she could get too worked up over, faint and distant and hard to catch hold of.
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