"When are you leaving?"

"Only a week before summer break. My father is highly against me missing more than that."

"I see." I wished I had somewhere sunny to escape to as well.

"I thought your mother would want to spend the summer at your grandmother’s house?" Angela wondered.

"I don’t believe we shall this year. Well, perhaps. My father will not.." The sentence trailed off. Angela looked at me knowingly, yet she did not proceed. We gave each other encouraging smiles and went back to grasp the few minutes of free reading we had left.

"You girls will not believe what I saw the other night I was at the Bubble Café!" Jessica Stanley whispered loudly behind Angela and me as we marched out of our last period class.

I had no intention of stimulating her but Angela asked just to be polite and get her to stop breathing down our necks.

"Well, from across the street let’s just say he looked like an apparition!"

"A what?" I stifled a laugh.

"Seriously!" Jessica continued as though she were completely intrigued to even notice the mockery showing off my face. "I’ve never seen anything like it! So gorgeous! Tall of course, very pale, perfectly divine face! Reddish brown hair and I was too far to see the color of his eyes but that doesn’t quite matter since his physique was…beyond describable!"

"You called this man an "it"?" Angela asked and I stifled another laugh.

Jessica pretended she hadn’t heard. "He didn’t seem much older than us. Probably even our age." Then she sighed.

"Ladies." A unmistaken ably irritated voice chimed behind us. It was our English teacher, Ms. Talbot. "Let’s move along now."

Angela, Jessica and I willingly filed along with the other girls out the front doors.

"Well, Jess, if Bella and I see a gorgeous apparition walking about we’ll be sure to get his name for you." Angela teased as we made our way down the steps. A fierce wind was whipping our hair and notebooks about. It was a good thing I lived only two blocks from the academy.

"I’m telling you, he was real!" Jessica strained but Angela and I ignore her. I was all to eager to turn my back on the Whipple Girl’s Academy.