Wild Girls by Mary Stewart Atwell

Author:Mary Stewart Atwell [Atwell, Mary Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67776-9
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2012-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

The river dream came to me for the first time that night. It was summer and I was skinny-dipping, something I had never done in my waking life. The water was like cool silk against my skin, and the trees bending over the bank left dusty prints of pollen on the surface. The sun, angled through the branches, turned everything the color of copper. I knew I had nothing to worry about; I had a vague sense that there had been troubles in the past but they were all gone now, behind me. But my left foot had caught on something, a strand of algae, an old rope, and suddenly I was pulled down through layers of cold to the bottom of the river.

In the morning I was tired and blurry, my body chilled from the dark progress of the dream. All I’d heard before Travis made me go home was that Mason wasn’t dead, and that Mr. Ortega had decided not to sue after Travis pointed out that a trial might bring him unwelcome media attention. I planned to head down to the hospital right after breakfast, but as soon as I walked into the kitchen, I could tell that I wouldn’t get away so easily. Mom had taken everything out of the refrigerator and the cabinets, lining up the boxes, jars, and bottles on the table and countertops. Pinto beans cozied up to ketchup; capers rubbed elbows with steel-cut oats. Travis sat in the middle of it, reading the sports section. He raised his eyebrows at me but didn’t say anything.

Mom grabbed my wrist and towed me into the pantry, where every shelf was empty, eerie and white in the glow of the hanging bulb. “Look,” she said, pressing my palm against the shelf as if she were taking my fingerprints. I smelled rather than saw the layer of soft gray dust, and sneezed into my shoulder.

“See?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve cleaned in here in ten years.”

“That’s gross, Mom.”

“It’s disgusting, isn’t it? I’ve let things go for too long.”

Globs of yesterday’s mascara stuck in her lashes. With her stringy gray hair hanging around her face, she looked like another backwoods witch, Mrs. Lemons’s weird sister. She waved me toward the table, and I cleared the peanut butter and horseradish off my usual chair. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked. “I could make eggs.”

“No offense, but I don’t really want to eat while you’re cleaning.” I scooted my chair away from the trash can, where a dream-catcher that had hung on the pantry door for as long as I could remember was draped over a side-split carton of cornmeal. “Anyway, I have to go. I’m visiting Mason at the hospital.”

Mom gave me a concerned look, rubbing the heel of her hand against a patch of baking powder just below her right cheekbone. Her fingertips looked pickled, and I wondered if it was possible to come down with obsessive-compulsive disorder overnight, the way you came down with the flu.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.