Sophie's Stormy Summer (Faithgirlz!: The Sophie Series #6) by Nancy N. Rue | eBook

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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.
For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
---2 Corinthians 4:18

No way would I ever want to be a lifeguard here,' Maggie said.
Sophie tilted her head back to look from under her floppy hat at her
getting-tanner-by-the-minute friends.
Sophie's best-best friend, Fiona, didn't look up from the miniature
hut they were building in the sand with dried seaweed sticks. She kept
poking them in the sand with one hand while she brushed the usual
strand of hair out of one eye with the other.
'Why not, Mags?' she said.
Kitty wrinkled her made-like-china
nose, now spattered with freckles. 'I
wouldn't want to be a lifeguard, but I
might want to be saved by one.' Her
dark ponytail bounced as she giggled---
which she did at the end of almost
every sentence.
'Of course you would,' Darbie said, her Irish accent lilting
through. 'If it was a boy lifeguard.'
'Gross,' Fiona said.
Sophie looked at Maggie, whose dark eyes were going from one
of the Corn Flakes to another.
'So why wouldn't you want to be a lifeguard here, Mags?' she
said.
All the Corn Flakes sat back on their heels and squinted
through the sun at Maggie.
'Because your little brother and sister are always screaming
like there's a shark attack 24/7,' Maggie said. Her words seemed
to make soft thuds in the sand. But Sophie thought being at the
beach even made Maggie's matter-of-fact voice sound lighter.
'How does the lifeguard know when to save somebody and when
not to?'
She nodded toward Fiona's little brother, Rory, and her even
littler sister, Isabella, who hadn't stopped shouting and squealing
the whole five days they had been at Virginia Beach.
'Izzy and Rory have to make all those sounds at the seashore
because they're little,' Sophie said. She had also felt like holding her arms
out to the ocean and squealing several times since she and the Corn
Flakes had been there, and she was TWELVE. It was as if the waves
themselves, tumbling over one another like puppies, were setting her free.
Well, that and the fact that she was here with the four people in the whole
world she could be herself with.
Sure, we're flakes, Sophie thought happily. And we do corny stuff---
but we are who we are.
'At least they're making happy noises for a change,' Darbie said,
nodding toward Izzy and Rory. 'Usually they're shrieking like
terrorists.' She clapped a sunblock-shiny hand over her mouth and
looked quickly at Fiona's mother. 'No offense, Dr. Bunting,' she
said through her fingers. 'They're perfectly charming.'
Dr. Bunting pulled off her sunglasses and turned to Darbie. 'You
were right the first time. They are little terrorists.'
'What I can't get,' Fiona said, 'is why they always have to be
throwing something---buckets, sand, food---on each OTHER.'
She sighed out loud. 'It's heinous.'
Dr. Bunting blinked her gray-like-Fiona's eyes and put her
sunglasses back on. 'If tossing a few Cheetos is the worst those
two do before we leave here, it's because Miss Genevieve is the
nanny from heaven.'
'I thought we were supposed to call her the au pair,' Maggie
said.
'Just call me Genevieve.' The blonde, creamy-skinned woman
who was on her knees making castle towers pointed a graceful
finger at Rory. 'Get more of that sand you just gave me,' she said
to him. 'With it just wet enough, we can build anything.'
Rory trotted obediently toward the water with his bucket and
shovel, and Dr. Bunting looked out from under the brim of her
white visor. 'See what I mean?' she said.
Sophie tried to imagine Fiona's last nanny playing at the beach
with Rory and Izzy dumping seashells over each other's heads. Miss
Odetta Clide had handed out demerits if they spilled their milk. True,
she had turned out to be less like a steel rod than they'd thought at
first, but she NEVER would have gotten on her hands and knees in
the sand.
The Corn Flakes---including their newest member, Willoughby---
had all been worried about who would take Miss Odetta Clide's place
when she married Fiona's grandfather Boppa, and they went off to
Europe on their honeymoon for the summer. With Fiona's parents
taking all of the girls---except Willoughby, who was on vacation
with her family---to Virginia Beach for ten whole days, the choice
of a nanny would determine the amount of fun they could have.
Sophie watched Genevieve drip wet sand through her hand to
create a castle tower, the way soft ice cream piled on top of a cone.
The au pair's thick braid hung over her shoulder like a silk rope,
and her blue eyes seemed to hug Isabella as the curly-headed
four-year-old tried to dribble sand through her tiny fingers. I
want to be like Genevieve when I grow up, Sophie thought. IF
I grow up.
Not that she WANTED to---at least not right now. Here---
building a little beach hut out of dried sticks of seaweed with her
best friends, she didn't have to think about anything scary, like
starting middle school in two months . . .
'Okay,' Sophie said out loud. 'Everybody tell their favorite
part about being at the beach so far.'
Fiona pushed a stubborn strand of golden-brown hair behind
one ear as she poked the sticks into the adobe-colored sand like
she was doing math. 'I liked it when we dug those giant bowls in
the sand and climbed in there, all of us together.'
'We KILLED ourselves laughing over things that are funny only
to us,' Darbie said.
'Was that your favorite too?' Sophie said to her.
Darbie kept weaving seaweed into the roof of their masterpiece for
a minute. Her reddish hair and her snapping eyes were as dark as her
flesh was white. She was the one most likely to burn like a marshmallow.
Sophie liked to think of Darbie running on the beaches of Northern
Ireland where she had lived until last year, shouting things like
'blackguards'---which Darbie pronounced as 'blaggards' and meant
people who did evil things.
'My favorite,' Darbie said finally, 'was when we used those long
sticks to write our names on the beach---and the shells were our
periods and commas.' She grinned her crooked-toothed smile.
'At least, the shells we're not taking home by the bucketful to
Poquoson.'
'I liked pelican-watching,' Maggie said. She was just returning to
the job site with a bucket full of dried seaweed, her face Maggiesolemn,
as if she were doing serious business. 'I liked watching
them fish.'
'I DIDN'T like that part,' Kitty said. 'We only did that when
Genevieve made us wait thirty minutes after we ate before we
could go back in the water.'
Maggie cocked her head at Kitty, so that her blunt-cut shiny
hair splashed against her face just below her ears. 'You have to
do that,' she said. 'Or you'll get a cramp and drown.'
Sophie squinted her brown eyes through her glasses at Kitty.
'So what WAS your favorite?'

Sophie's Stormy Summer (Faithgirlz!: The Sophie Series #6)

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Sophie's Stormy Summer (Faithgirlz!: The Sophie Series #6)

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