Improper Order (Primrose Leary, 2) - Softcover

Sullivan, Deirdre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908195231 ISBN 13: 9781908195234

Verlag: Little Island, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

<p><b>The second in a funny, smart, and touching young adult series, perfect for fans of Louise Rennison</b></p><p>Primrose Leary is a witty, wonderfully weird teenager whose friends are pairing up around her. Even Prim&#8217;s Dad is loved up, and she&#8217;s starting to feel a little lonely. But when Prim accidentally hooks up with Kevin, things start to get messy. And when it&#8217;s revealed that beautiful Mac&#8217;s dad is the drunk driver who knocked down and killed Prim&#8217;s mother, Prim has some serious work to do to untangle her feelings. </p>

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>Deirdre Sullivan</b> is&#160;a grade&#160;school teacher&#160;and the author of the&#160;Nightmare Club series, under the name Annie Graves.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Improper Order

By Deirdre Sullivan

Little Island

Copyright © 2013 Deirdre Sullivan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-908195-23-4

CHAPTER 1

PLUMP PATERNAL WOMAN (6)

When I grow up I want to be a cruciverbalist. Fintan thinks that this is no sort of a job at all, but seeing as his job consists of making more and more money for people who are already far too rich for their own good, his opinion is a bit redundant.

His title now is 'Director of Operations', which would be impressive except they aren't real operations, like transplants or nose-jobs, and he isn't the real director of anything useful, like a play or a film or even a silly little Christmas pageant like we had in primary school. I understand, of course, that he is not that kind of director, but when I pretend not to understand that, he gets all frustrated and sighs heavily and eventually his moustache begins to flutter like a big black scrubbing brush that is ruffled by a gentle summer breeze.

The reason I want to be a cruciverbalist is not because it sounds like some sort of dark wizard (although that is one of many amazing perks). No, I want to do it because I have started doing the crosswords in The Irish Times and they are hard. Like, crazy hard. Except for the Simplex, because it has simple in the title and so I refuse to let it defeat me. So one day, when I had only gotten two of the cryptic clues, it occurred to me how amazing it would be to be the maker-upper of the puzzles, how pleased you would feel when people worked them out and how smug you would feel when they failed to do so.

So I started making up my own crossword clues, and it is kind of the most fun I have had by myself in ages. And it turns out it is an actual job. There's no college course for it, but I will learn my skills from the University of Life. (I also plan to go to real university, but all my talk about the University of Life is really getting on Fintan's wick, so that is why I keep going on about it when he's in the room.)

In real life, I think I might want to do journalism in college. Because then I could get a job at a newspaper and make sure their chief cruciverbalist has an accident so I can rise up to assume his or her place. The good thing about this plan is that you can repeat it as required, like with a shampoo, so if there are any other budding cruciverbalists at my place of work, I could take them down as well. I can do this by sneaky stairs-pushing or germ warfare, in which I catch a nasty cold and make out with all my enemies in order to pass it on to them.

But before I become evil, I have to have the skills to back it up. I have to study and hone and do lots of crosswords so I can understand their language and use it to my own nefarious ends. My ends are not always nefarious, only sometimes they can be. But not, like, crazy nefarious. More mildly nefarious. Divilish, as opposed to devilish. Because being a divil isn't the worst thing in the world you can be, but being the Devil is not a good thing at all.

Anyway, if I wanted to be the Devil I would have to push Karen down the stairs and take her job. That girl is nefarious personified. She broke Simone's iPod Touch yesterday by throwing it out a top-floor window, just to see what would happen.

Simone is one of Karen's good friends. Imagine how she would treat an enemy. I don't have to imagine, because she hates my guts. Luckily, I do not have an iPod Touch. I'd love an iPod Touch. Fintan is mean and does not shower me with enough gifts.

CHAPTER 2

FATHER

Things never really go away, do they? They lurk and lie in wait like wolves. Horrible, un-fluffy, lurk-in-the-darkness wolves. The kind that would never swallow a girl whole but chew her up to mincey dog-breath spit, so if a woodcutter happened to slice open its wolfish tummy the last thing he would find is a happy ending.

Happy endings are pretty rare. The most people get if they're lucky is a happy beginning. I didn't even get that. Mum and Dad were hardly on speaking terms when I was born. I was the little wailing white flag of truce. Or so they told me (though not in those exact words, obviously).

Really, I think it is just easier to try to get along than to stay mad at someone for an indeterminate length of time. I mean, being angry for more than a brief period of time takes effort. You have to work at it. And what if the person you are angry with says something hilarious or offers you a delicious treat of some kind? Let's say, for argument's sake, a caramel slice and a cup of tea. It is hard to stay angry at somebody when you are eating something delicious that they have bought in the cool deli place adjacent to their work which wraps their treats in fancy pink and white paper.

Fintan is lucky that that deli exists, is all I am saying. Because otherwise having a teenage daughter would be a whole lot harder for him.

The reason I was angry with him was to do with him forgetting to pick me up from swimming class. I'd left two notes on the fridge and texted him in the morning to remind him.

But instead he went on a date with Hedda and turned his phone off. Hedda was angry with him too. You see, he is always taking phone calls from important people while they are going places. Once he even left in the middle of a play to talk to a man in China about something. Hedda believes that if you are going to spend time with someone, you should actually spend time with them, instead of ignoring them and doing important businessman-type stuff like talking about mergers and stock portfolios and indices.

See, the weird thing is that money isn't even real. It is, like, this fictional concept we all agree on to make the transfer of goods and services flow more smoothly. Mum's friend Sorrel once went to live in a commune where they used swapping and kindness instead of money. It didn't really work, though, because once the swapping got heated, the kindness kind of went down the pan. She was the one who explained to me about money being made up and stuff. I mean, they are just bits of metal and paper. The only value they have is the one that we assign to them.

Sorrel was the person who dropped me home after I had been waiting on my own an hour outside a now-closing swimming pool. She was the only one who was picking up her phone, which is weird because she normally doesn't even have it switched on. She was waiting for a call from this nice organic farmer she met at a drumming circle. When she told me this, I did an eye-roll and her eyes filled with tears and she told me that I had just done my mother's 'Oh, for the love of God' face.

She waited with me in the kitchen till about eleven o' clock. Dad still wasn't home, but I wanted to go to bed because I had school in the morning and stuff. Luckily, I had got my homework done at Mary's before swimming because I would have been too angry to do it afterwards.

Sometimes I forget how useless Fintan is at this whole being-a-father business. Luckily, he is always ready to remind me with some new and stupid mishap. At least he didn't bring up the time I stole the engagement ring he got for Hedda. See, a year and a half ago, Dad almost proposed to Hedda on a trip to New York. Only he couldn't – because I had taken the engagement ring from its little box in a perfectly understandable fit of wanting to be told if my dad was going to make any life-changing decisions.

I still don't think I was wholly in the wrong. If it were the right thing for Dad, he would have proposed anyway. It's not like the ring is hyper-important. When Mum's friend Méadhbh was proposed to by her husband Frank, he...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Little Island
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1908195231
• ISBN 13: 9781908195234
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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