Sometimes my mom invites her friends over for super.
Lenny, Marthe, Anita, Gerard, Ruth.
I lie on the the living-room floor doing my homework. With one ear, I hear their voices in the kitchen, with the other, I hear my mom's music coming from the stereo.
These days it's Kate and Anna McGarrigle over and over again.
Listening to them, I imagine myself a gorgeous stubborn singer travelling the world with hope and guitar, turning as rough and piney as a Laurentian forest.
My brothers think the McGarrigle sisters are too sappy. They'd rather listen to
The Police.
They's rather lock themselves in their room with
Mario Bros. And some Licorice. They are as skinny as rails, so they are allowed.
Tonight the music, Anita's and Ruth's squeals, the joy shimmering in the light from the orange-fringed lamp, the leg of lamb, all of it helps me forget that tomorrow I'll be getting on a bus to Lake Kanawana with forty kids in shorts, not one of them a friend.
Jane, the fox and me, P54-57
by Fanny Britt, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault
ISBN 978-1-55498-360-5
