The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey

Author:Rebecca Godfrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

On my second day, I noticed the Blue House.

I was sitting on his windowsill, reading in my borrowed books about tourniquets and iodine.

Nicholas lived in a neighborhood called Fairfield, which is about five miles from downtown. In the clear. It was a hidden-away neighborhood I’d never been to before, and I was surprised by it because it was even more run-down than the street where I lived with my dad. Here the houses were all slammed together on sideways streets. The tiny backyards were without apple trees or rosebushes, just discarded junk—a sagging couch, a deflated kiddie pool, mangled motorbikes, all brown and rotting and rainsoaked. It was obviously a neighborhood for derelicts, a place I should have felt I belonged.

And the house that caught my eye seemed to have a kind of dirty grandeur. It was the highest on the hill, shoved behind a smaller house. There was something almost human about it, hovering behind like the older brother, the bully, the lurking boy.

The rotting wood of the house was painted blue, not sky blue, but dark blue, the blue of wet jeans and American police uniforms. The broken windows were covered with Saran Wrap; an A in a red circle was spraypainted on the front door. I stared at the house, and after a few minutes, I saw a girl. A girl who must have come from the Empress gutters, ’cause she was dressed just like Cassie, with a shaved head, a fringe of bangs, a body enveloped by a green army jacket. She gave the door a sudden kick. When no one answered, she shimmied up a rain pipe, and climbed in, head first, through the plastic pane of the window. I saw the soles of her black boots rise up against the window’s edge. Then she vanished, and the sky seemed whiter and duller than it had ever been before.

I went back to reading about arteries. Must be the speed, I thought, because I just could not concentrate.

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