Sometime Soon

Sometime Soon - By Debra Doxer




prologue



In the darkness a flashlight clicked on beneath the heavy winter quilt of thirteen-year-old Andrea Whitman. She just couldn’t fall sleep until she finished her reading assignment. The assignment wasn’t due for another week, but she had to know how To Kill A Mockingbird ended. She thought Atticus Finch was the most interesting character she’d ever come across in a story. She would never admit this to anyone, but maybe she had a little bit of a crush on him--even though his hair was turning grey and he wore glasses. Her friends were all in love with Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester. But she thought they were both so unlikeable at the beginning of their stories that they couldn’t redeem themselves to her in the end. Her friend Bethany even thought Heathcliff was sexy. But in her opinion, Heathcliff was the worst of all.

From the very first, Atticus was brave, honest, and forthright. He was just the way she thought a good man should be. She admired that he always did the right thing, even if it wasn’t the easy thing. That was what her parents had taught her and her sister Laura to do. But she was only thirteen, so she hadn’t really had a chance to put that into practice yet.

As Andrea continued to read, she thought of her own father and of the boys she went to school with. Perhaps her father had the qualities she admired in Atticus. He was honest, and she knew that he loved her. But the boys in school were another story. They teased her--a lot. They made fun of her dark curly hair and the fact that she always did her homework. She saw them lying to the teachers and making up stories so they wouldn’t get into trouble when they were caught doing something they shouldn’t. They were loud and disrespectful to their elders. No, none of the boys she knew were anything like Atticus. She decided that when she grew up, she was going to find a man who possessed the admirable qualities of Atticus Finch. She would settle for nothing less.