Bigger Than a Bread Box by Laurel Snyder

Author:Laurel Snyder
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Girls & Women, Fantasy & Magic, Family, Marriage & Divorce
ISBN: 9780375899980
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-09-26T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

I bolted out into the chilly day, down the steps of the school. I ran and ran, barely glancing around me for traffic, just staring at my feet, flashing in a red blur above the cracked sidewalks. I ran away from the school, away from the house. I ran along a hilly street, past the park with the zoo in it and along a bridge that crossed a highway. I stopped on the bridge for a minute and pressed my face and hands against the chain-link fence that was there to keep people from jumping. The metal was cold against my cheeks. Below me, the highway rushed loud like waves crashing. It sounded strangely like the ocean, like home.

A woman walked past me and gave me a concerned look, so I started running again, through intersections. Somewhere along the way, I lost my headband. When I finally stopped, to bend over double and take a deep, painful breath, I looked up and found I was in front of a deserted gas station, staring across four lanes of traffic at the wall that surrounded the old cemetery. Where I’d walked that day with Lew in his stroller.

I wished I had Lew with me now.

No, I didn’t. I wished I were home with Lew. Home home. And I wished that none of this had ever happened: not the box or Mom and Dad fighting or Atlanta or Hannah or any of it. But that was one wish I couldn’t even steal.

A few feet away, on the bench in the old gas station, a man was asleep under a dirty blanket for everyone to see. Surrounded by shopping carts of dirty clothes and aluminum cans. I thought about how tired he must be, to sleep like that, in public. I guess people get to a point where they don’t care what anyone else thinks of them. I almost wished I could feel like that.

I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I figured the cemetery was as good a place as any to waste time, so I crossed the street and climbed over the brick wall. Then I wandered around for a while, staring at the old names and the overgrown plots, picking up trash and stuffing it into a torn McDonald’s bag I found on the ground. The wind was biting, and I didn’t have a jacket on; plus there was a lot more trash than I could stuff into the bag. What good was it doing? I stopped trying to pick up the graveyard and sat in the doorway of a mausoleum—one of Lew’s “little houses.” The stone floor was frigid through my jeans, but at least I was out of the wind. I pulled up my knees and hugged myself, shivering.

I tried not to think of all the dead people, or of the jacket, or of Baltimore, or of my dad. I realized I had a lot of things to not think about. But the thoughts that kept coming

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