Ever After Read Online Free

good. Although I did graduate cum laude from Arizona State, I hadn’t quite finished my credential. It’s hard finding a job in an overseas school without at least two years’ US experience. But I decide to try anyway.
    I mail out sixty letters, then buy a Eurail pass and start on my journey. It’s May. Mom is still teaching, Wills is in school. Dad says he’ll take care of Wills when Mom isn’t home. I hate to depend on them so much, but there’s no other way.
    I travel at night from one city to another. I sleep on the train to save hotel bills. I do quite a bit of criss-crossing Europe, looking for the night train-rides that are about eight or ten hours long. When I get off a train in the city where I’m going to be interviewed, I head to a phone, confirm the rendezvous, then look for a reasonable restroom where I can put myself in order. I take more “bird-baths” in sinks of train stations than I ever thought I’d take in my whole life.
    Most of the interviews are discouraging. People are usually interested in the fact I can speak French, German, and English, and have a good academic background, but they hold the lack of experience against me. I try to beef my résumé up with my nursery-school teaching in Idylwild and Phoenix, but it doesn’t help much.
    After two weeks on the road, with one or two interviews every day, I still have nothing definite. The next stop is near Munich. In fact, I have one interview at an international school right at the head of the Starnberger See near the city of Starnberg. We lived nearby, in Seeshaupt, when I was a child and Dad was on sabbatical from his teaching. It’s only a half-hour trip on the train from Starnberg to Seeshaupt.
    The last time I saw Dad, he said he’d just started writing a new book, part of which takes place in Seeshaupt. He said it’s built around the stories he told us in the morning about Franky Furbo, a wonderful magic fox. In fact, I was the one who suggested he could make a great adult book from those stories. I’d love to have read it, but I guess I never will. Or maybe there is a way. I just don’t know about those things yet. It’s a strange situation we’re in.
    The man who interviews me in Starnberg, Stan, is one of the smilingest men I’ve ever met. We get along right away. But it’s the same thing: he doesn’t think he can hire someone without experience. The fact I speak such good German impresses him. I’m impressed too because he, an American, can speak incredibly good German himself. It turns out his first wife, who has died, was German.
    He asks me to wait a few minutes in the office and he’ll be right back. I think maybe he’s going to the bathroom. I’ve already given up. After around twenty rejections, one loses confidence. I’m hoping to catch a train down to Seeshaupt before dark.
    He comes back smiling. But then he’s always smiling. He rubs his hands together.
    â€œYou’re lucky, Kate. I talked the director into it. I exaggerated your nursery-school experience a bit, even more than you did, so don’t make a liar of me. But you’re the kind of teacher I’m always looking for, optimistic, smiling, full of enthusiasm and energy. Maybe after you’ve had two years’ experience, you won’t be that way, but you’re hired to teach first grade. You’ll get the same salary as the other first-grade teacher I hired last year. I’m sure you’ll love her.”
    I could have fallen over right there in his office; I have a hard time to keep from crying. It’s all been so difficult the last few years and now it looks so beautiful. I know I must have thanked him but I don’t remember. He comes around his desk.
    â€œCome on, Kate, let me show you the school. We’re really proud of it. The German government built this place for us and about half our students are German. Their parents