The Broken Girls by James Simone St

Author:James, Simone St. [James, Simone St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, thriller, Historical, Horror, Paranormal, Suspense
Goodreads: 35533431
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2018-03-20T07:00:00+00:00

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They sat on the floor of their room that night, all four of them, gathered around CeCe’s radio. With the sound low so Susan Brady wouldn’t hear, they listened to a show about cops chasing a murderer, and a rendition of “Three Little Maids” that made them all laugh. Then another show, this one about cowboys, before it got late enough that everything went off the air and CeCe turned the radio off. And then they talked.

In the dark, when they’d all been listening for hours, already relaxed, it suddenly became easy. The words flowed, weaving over one another, making up the pattern as they went along. Roberta told about Uncle Van, about the day she had opened the garage door and found him, sitting on a wooden chair, weeping, a pistol in his mouth. She told them of the days afterward, the silence in herself that she couldn’t break, the doctors, Uncle Van’s bloodshot eyes. He hadn’t been able to look at her. Roberta felt a new lump in her throat as she told it, remembering. She wished now that she’d crawled into Uncle Van’s lap and put her arms around his neck and never let go. But she’d been thirteen, and everyone had been horrified and silent, including her, and she hadn’t known what to do.

“Where is he now?” Katie’s low voice came through the dark when Roberta finished.

“He’s still at home,” Roberta said. “He sees doctors. Mother says he isn’t well, that Dad wants to put him in a hospital.” She forced the words out. “They’re fighting. Mother and Dad. I could see it on Family Visit Day—they wouldn’t look at each other, talk to each other. They’re ashamed of me and Uncle Van both. I know Dad works a lot. Mother’s eyes were red, and she says . . . she says it isn’t a good time to come home.”

The others talked now as Roberta subsided. A weight had lifted from her chest. Each girl spoke while the others were quiet, listening.

It went like that, night after night. Katie, with CeCe as an accomplice, began pilfering extra food from the dining hall at supper, sneaking through a door into the kitchen and taking it while CeCe kept watch. They snacked on the extra food every night after dark; they pretended that it was for all of them, but by tacit agreement they gave most of it to Sonia. With the lights out and the cold winter coming outside, they ate and listened to the radio and told their stories, one by one, detail upon detail. Katie and Thomas, the boy who’d attacked her and told her to hold still. CeCe and her mother’s accident at the beach. Roberta told them, hesitantly, about the song she’d heard on the hockey field, the same song Uncle Van had been playing in the garage that day, as if someone or something had drawn the memory straight from her mind. And the next night Katie told them about Special Detention, and the spiders, and the messages in the textbooks.

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