![]() ![]() At school, my peers laughed when I spoke in class, and so I preferred reading. Though my reading and writing skills were good enough to be in a classroom with native English speakers, my pronunciation lagged far behind. When I discovered Sweet Valley High, I had just completed the ESL program at my junior high and was now in regular English classes. We slept in the living room, my sister and me on the sofa-bed, my brother on the floor. We lived with my father and my stepmother in a one-bedroom apartment. Four years earlier, my siblings and I had run across the border to begin a new life in Los Angeles. The girls were high school cheerleaders with lots of friends and cute boyfriends. ![]() Their father was a lawyer their mother, an interior designer. ![]() ![]() Two beautiful, slender girls with a California tan and dimples on their left cheeks. Transfixed, reading under the covers with a flashlight, I entered the lives of identical twins named Jessica and Elizabeth. The girls on the cover, with their blond hair and blue-green eyes, stared at me and smiled, as if they wanted me to be their friend. I walked out of the library with a stack of titles such as Sweet Valley High. When I was in junior high school, the librarian at my public library handed me books from the young adult section to take home. I wanted to know what it was like to have two successful parents, to go on trips, to have beautiful clothes to wear. ![]()
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