Excerpt of Anne of a Different Island by Virginia Kantra

“Name?” The barista’s marker poised above the cup.

“Anne. With an e,” I added.

I waited for the answering glimmer that would identify the girl at the airport coffee shop as a kindred spirit. Any sort of recognition, I told myself, would be a sign. A connection, like a message from my dad.

When I was eight, my father brought a copy of Anne of Green Gables home from the library’s used-book sale. I’d been sick for a week, some kind of flu that left me confined to the house, antsy and bored. My easygoing father was useless in the sickroom, my mother said. (Uselessness, in her eyes, was a sin, like greed or envy or forgetting to take off your shoes in the house.) He’d stood there awkwardly in the door of my small room, his big carpenter’s hand wrapped around a battered green paperback with a red-haired girl on the cover, and I’d been overwhelmed with love.

He was not a reader, my dad. But somehow he’d understood (or been told by my English teacher, Mrs. Powell) that I needed Anne Shirley in my life. She became my fictional best friend, my inspiration, reassurance that a strange girl with a big imagination and a bigger mouth could find her place in the world.

Of course, I could never truly be Anne. I wasn’t Canadian, for one thing. Or a natural redhead. Or an orphan. But as soon as I turned eighteen, I had an Anne Shirley quote tattooed on my right arm, paid for with savings from working in my mother’s fudge shop over the summer: Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet.

“Looks like a mistake to me,” my mother said when I’d proudly revealed my new ink.

The barista scrawled on the cup. “Anything else?”

Her voice broke into my memories. I blinked, abruptly recalled to the present. Around us, the terminal rang with footsteps, rattling wheels, and echoing flight announcements bouncing off the cavernous ceiling. “Oh. No. Thanks.”

“Receipt?”

I shook my head wordlessly, stuffing a dollar into the tip jar. I was already running late. Again. I couldn’t miss my connecting flight. I grabbed my drink, glancing at the name written on the side of the cup. E-N-N.

Stupid tears pricked my eyes.

“Not everyone thinks Anne Shirley is a cultural icon,” Chris sometimes pointed out with gentle logic.

But Chris wasn’t here.

A lump lodged in my throat. Neither was Dad. Not here. Ever again. Gone. Another echo in the emptiness of my heart.

I was going home to my father’s funeral. Alone. Without my boyfriend.