Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Laura Harrington, 2011
All rights reserved
A Pamela Dorman Book / Viking
Publisher’s Note This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Harrington, Laura, 1953—
Alice Bliss / Laura Harrington.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-51529-7
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Families of military personnel—Fiction. 3. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. Iraq War, 2003—Social aspects—United States—Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A78185A79 2011
813’.6—dc22 2010049089
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For Patrick
Prologue: August 20th
This is the first time Alice has been allowed to walk back to their campsite from the Kelp Shed alone. She is fourteen, barefoot, her sneakers tied together by the laces and slung across her shoulder so she can feel the soft, sandy dust of the single-track road between her toes. Her sister fell asleep halfway through the square dance, dropping from hyperexcited to unconscious in a flash. Her father carries Ellie draped over his shoulder, and casually, or so it seems, her mother says, “Come home when the dance is done.”
She can hardly believe it. The dance is still in her feet, still in her bones, the steps like an intricate game. She danced with everyone and anyone at all, old and young, men and women, just to stay on the floor and moving. The caller was a blind man with two fingers missing from his left hand. His face was wrinkled and brown from the sun, his body heavy and the voice that called the steps strangely high and sweet. A boy’s voice in a man’s body. A boy’s wildness, as though he had no awareness of himself in his body.
She gave in, finally, and danced with her father—embarrassed to be asked by him, worried that everyone would be watching and judging and thinking her still a child. But he surprises her. He is a good dancer. Precise. His hands firm on her back or her hand or her arm. She is suddenly