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Escaping Perfect - Hardcover

Harrison, Emma

 
9781481442121: Escaping Perfect
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1481442120 ISBN 13: 9781481442121
Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Gone Girl meets the TV show Nashville in this sultry summer read about a girl who runs away from her high-profile past to live the normal life she’s always wanted.

Cecilia Montgomery has been America’s sweetheart since the day she was born. A member of the prestigious Montgomery family—the US equivalent of royalty—her childhood was cut short after she was nearly kidnapped. Since then, Cecilia has been hidden away, her adolescence spent at an exclusive boarding school.

Her dreams of becoming a professional violinist—dashed.

Her desire to be a normal teenager—not possible.

Her relationship with her once-loving parents—bitter and strained.

Nothing about Cecilia’s life is what she would have planned for herself. So when an opportune moment presents itself, Cecilia seizes the chance to become someone else. To escape. To disappear. To have the life she always dreamed about, far away from her mother’s biting remarks and her sheltered upbringing.

Cecilia says goodbye to the Montgomery name and legacy to become Lia Washington: relaxed, wild, in love, free, and living on her own terms for the very first time. But being on your own isn’t always as easy as it seems…

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emma Harrison has written several YA romances including The Best Girl, Tourist Trap, Snow Queens, and Finding What’s Real, as well as many TV and movie adaptations. When Emma is not writing, she loves to bake, work out, read, and watch way too much TV. She lives in New Jersey with her incredibly awesome husband and two perfectly adorable sons.

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Escaping Perfect

Chapter One

“Senator Montgomery! Senator Montgomery! Roll down the window! Just for a second! Senator Montgomery!”

There was a bang and a shout—some photog getting so close to the limo that he tripped and slammed his camera into the side of the car—and so the most hellish part of my day from hell truly began.

The rest of the paparazzi crowded around the limousine’s tinted windows as it eased through the wrought-iron gates of the South Palm Memorial Cemetery. They couldn’t see me or my mom and dad, would only go home with pictures of their own cameras’ reflections. But that didn’t stop them. Nothing ever stopped them. Some people made a living just by selling whatever pictures they could get of our family. And now the one unfamous person in my world had died, and of course the photographers were still here, clamoring for shots of the living.

Sometimes I really wished their cameras would spontaneously combust in their faces. But only when I was feeling truly pissed at the world. Like now.

“Five minutes, Cecilia,” my mother said tersely, glancing up from her tablet to check her Cartier watch. “We have to get this show on the road. I have a briefing at three.”

I felt my father’s body go rigid, even with him sitting clear on the other side of the limo.

It’s Gigi’s funeral, I thought bitterly. You couldn’t take one day off?

What I said was, “Yes, ma’am.”

Outside the windows, rows of white and gray headstones stretched into the distance for what seemed like miles. It was all so anonymous. My grandmother didn’t belong here, camou­flaged by the dreary sameness. She belonged someplace special.

My mom’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t take that tone with your mother.”

The great Rebecca Montgomery, aka dear old Mom, loved to refer to herself in the third person. Ever since I was a toddler, it was:

Look, Cecilia, Mommy’s on TV!

Mommy will only be gone for three weeks, but don’t worry. Miss Jessica will take care of you!

No, no! Mommy can’t hug you right now. This suit is couture.

Yeah. The word “maternal” was not in her vocabulary.

“It’s not as if I can take the time off right now,” she added, reading my mind. “Not when there’s so much work to do.”

Of course there was. It was an election year. Nothing was more all-consuming for my mother than an election year.

She huffed out a breath and placed the tablet aside, opening a compact to check her perfectly bobbed chestnut-brown hair.

“I still don’t understand why we had to fly all the way down here to this godforsaken swamp for her funeral when we have a perfectly beautiful burial plot back in Beacon Hill.”

“Because my mother lived here,” my father said, still staring out the window. “She wanted to be buried here. You never gave her anything she wanted in life, Rebecca; you’d think you could at least give her this.”

“Oh. So I see everyone’s ganging up on me today.” My mother clicked the compact closed and shoved it back into her black Birkin bag. She had a right to be surprised. My father, a high-powered defense attorney for Boston’s wealthiest residents, usually saved all argumentative tones for the courtroom. I hardly ever heard him raise his voice or even snipe at my mom, unless it was from behind very firmly closed doors. “It wasn’t entirely my fault that Maura and I didn’t get along. She did play a hand in it, you know.”

“But she’s still Dad’s mom,” I said quietly. “And my grandmother. And we’re never going to see her again.”

You could at least pretend to be sad.

My mother sighed her impatient sigh. “Cecilia . . .”

“Mom, please,” I said, my voice shaky. “Could you maybe not be a bitch right now? Just for today?”

My left cheek exploded in pain. I didn’t even see my mother move until she was settling back into her seat across from mine, tucking the hand that had just slapped me into her purse.

My left eye prickled over with purple and gray spots. I brought my quaking fingers to my cheek.

“Was that really necessary?” my father asked.

I blinked, surprised he’d even bothered. He’d never said anything to her the many other times she’d smacked me.

“Stay out of it,” she growled at him.

My father clenched his jaw and looked out the window. Mother tugged down on her suit jacket and glared at me. “How dare you?”

It had been a long time since she’d hit me. Possibly because I had hardly seen her for more than an hour or two here and there over the past two years. Maybe I hadn’t had time to piss her off enough. But now? On the day we were burying my grandmother?

“Gigi was my best friend,” I muttered to the door, turning the stinging side of my face away from her. “Just leave me alone.”

“What was that? If you’re going to speak, at least enunciate,” my mother said.

I sat up straight, trying very hard not to tremble. “I said, Gigi was my best friend. And she was more like a mother to me than you’ve ever been.”

My mom made an indignant noise at the back of her throat. “I should throw you right out of this car, young lady.”

“Like you’d ever do that,” I shot back. “You’d rather die than let me see the light of day.”

I hadn’t even been allowed to go out for my eighteenth birthday last month. Instead my mother—or rather, her assistant, Tash—had sent me a gift at boarding school, but she hadn’t otherwise acknowledged it. No call, no text, no e-mail. Just a hand-delivered box from Tiffany containing an ugly ladybug pendant I immediately donated to my graduating class’s silent charity auction.

I crossed my arms and sat back, but the huge bun her stylist had fashioned out of my mane of curls held my skull away from the headrest at an uncomfortable angle. My irritation spiked. Even though I was sitting here declaring my ability to be my own person, I’d spent the entire day letting her order me around as always.

I said the Kenneth Cole, Cecilia, not the Calvin Klein.

Take off that god-awful lip color. Did you pick that yourself? When was the last time we had your eyes checked?

And then, when she’d seen my hair hanging loose around my shoulders: I’ll have Felicia come take care of you next. How you deal with all that hair, I have no idea.

And what had I said all morning long? “Yes, ma’am.”

Sometimes I really loathed myself. I should have asked her how she dealt with having a stick up her butt all the time.

Of course, my hair wasn’t the only thing about me that my mother couldn’t wrap her brain around, but it wasn’t surprising, considering her hair had always been tame and shiny and cut above the chin. I had inherited her skinny bones and angular face, and my dad’s extreme height and dark curly hair—though he kept his almost entirely shaved. My skin color was all my own, somewhere between his dark chocolate and her milky white. I pushed my butt all...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1481442120
ISBN 13 
9781481442121
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande