One For Sorrow by Christopher Barzak

Author:Christopher Barzak [Barzak, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-08-27T17:00:00+00:00

The next morning I woke to sunlight falling through the window. The woods were full of chirping already and when I sat up and went to the doorway, I saw the white tail of a deer lifted high as she jumped into a thicket of thorny brush and trees and sped away. She must have heard the cot as I got out of bed. “Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t hear her rustling in the brush anymore, so she was either out of hearing range or playing it safe, hiding.

I felt a bit hungry so I got the bag of cereal out of my backpack and had a couple handfuls before it was completely gone. Luckily I was already starting to feel full again. Two handfuls of sugary cereal shouldn’t have made me feel full but the other option was eating the other half of the apple I’d tried to eat the day before, which I found at the bottom of my bag and took out to throw into the thicket where the doe had jumped away. Maybe she’d eat it and I wouldn’t feel so bad for scaring her. One thing I didn’t have much patience for anymore was people scaring other people. Like how Frances loved weirding me out with her story about why she killed her parents every morning and to tell the truth, that is just not cool. That’s crazy.

I was a little worried though because without the cereal and apple I had nothing to eat and I started to wonder if I’d have to eat crayfish from Sugar Creek or figure out what roots and plants were okay to chew on. Maybe I wouldn’t do so good on that survival show after all. I only had a few things I knew how to do to survive in this world. The one I was best at was running, and that wasn’t proving to get me very far. Maybe if Jamie was still with me, we could have put our heads together and come up with something. Or Gracie. She always seemed to know what to do. I was always the one without a clue. But they weren’t with me, and I knew I’d better think of something fast because at some point I would eventually need to eat again.

I didn’t want to stay in the shack anymore so I grabbed my backpack and started heading for Sugar Creek. The woods were peaceful that morning. Only a slight breeze blew, but you could tell that it was carrying winter on it, that somewhere down the line snow followed its trail. It was only a matter of how long it would take to reach here. A few weeks, I figured. And by then I’d hopefully have found somewhere to stay other than the old Amish logging camp. Even if I was still here when snow came, though, it was still better than home, where there was basically nothing but trouble waiting.

As I walked through the covered bridge, my shoes

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