Table of Contents 14 страница

Becca counters. “It’s sooo late.” She punctuates this with a fake yawn.

“You never sleep anyway,” I say, stepping toward the left, but Becca is there before me.

“Seriously, Charrrr-lieeeee,” Becca whines.

My adrenaline is spiking. Becca is annoying. I scoop her up over one shoulder and start to jog back toward Charlotte’s room. Becca pounds on my back a few times before she tenses each of her muscles and stretches herself out like a starfish. The toe of one of her sneakers catches on one side of a doorjamb to our right and her hand snatches the other, holding tight. The sudden change in momentum swings me sideways so we both crash into the door, which bangs open. We fall into a dark room, full of whirring and beeping.

The patient in the room screams. One of his machines starts to scream, too. Becca and I are still a tangle of limbs on the floor when a harried nurse comes running in.

“Out. Out. OUT!” she yells, yanking us to our feet.

Needless to say, our authorization is revoked. Greta and James look startled when we come barreling back through the heavy metal doors into the waiting room. I turn on my sister, my voice tight, my throat aching. “What the hell?”

Becca is rubbing an already swelling elbow from our fall. “Fine,” she yells back. “Fine. I was trying to be nice, but whatever. Charlotte doesn’t want to see you. Happy?”

Every bit of anger holding me up rushes out of me like a balloon deflating and flying in wild arcs, making the room spin. I sit in the nearest uncomfortable chair and hold my head between my knees.

Becca’s hand brushes my back. “Don’t be so dramatic, Charlie.”

I peek up at her.

“She doesn’t want you to remember her as sick. That’s all.” Becca’s big brown eyes get glassy. “She wants us to remember the good stuff.”

I put my head back down. I don’t want to have to remember her at all.

I want her to stay.

---

Greta and James are both staying over for what’s left of the night, James in my room and Greta with Becca. They appear to be taking turns babysitting me to be sure I don’t do anything rash. I think that’s funny because what could be more reckless than falling for a girl like Charlotte Finch?

Greta sits on the counter in the bathroom watching me brush my teeth. I consider stabbing myself in the ear with my toothbrush just to see what she’d do. Instead, I recite the elements of the periodic table in my head. When I reach Ununoctium, I spit and rinse.

“You still do the whole element thing?” Greta asks, a sliver of a smile on her lips.

“It’s a good song. How’d you know?”

Greta points. “Tapping your fingers.”

I lean over the sink, cupping the water in my hands and scrubbing my face. My eyes are burning. It’s got to be well after midnight.

Greta passes me the hand towel. “You doing okay in there, Chuck?”

I pat my face dry and glance at myself in the mirror. I don’t recognize myself. “I fell.”

“I know.”

There’s a horrible pressure everywhere, on my chest, behind my eyes, squeezing my temples. I close my eyes, but it doesn’t keep me from crying. Greta reaches out, grabbing the towel still in my hand, pulling it and me toward her until she can wrap her arms around my shoulders and tuck me in a hug.

“Shh,” she whispers into my hair, but it does no good because my crying is evolving into this loud sobbing. It draws James and Becca toward the tiny room. Becca wraps her arms around my waist and leans against my back. James’s ginormous frame barely fits, but he pulls himself up to sit next to Greta. Actually, half his ass is in the sink.

“Little better in there now?” Greta asks as soon as my sobs ebb into sniffles.

I try to suck in a full breath. It takes four tries before I can get one that doesn’t sound like I’m hiccupping. Finally, I nod at Greta.

“You’re strong, Chuck. You know that, right?”

I do. Struggling with my fears about losing Charlotte has put everything into perspective for me. There’s only one thing that can hurt me now, and it isn’t even Charlotte’s death. My biggest fear now is not earning her love while she’s still alive. “I know,” I say with a firm nod.

Greta’s smile exudes relief. “Good because you, Charles Hanson, are Charlotte’s hero.”

I shy away from Greta, considering this. I don’t think Charlotte wants a hero. Charlotte needs someone to love every bit of her. I want to be that person for her. But I don’t want to share my thoughts with everyone—they’re for Charlotte. So I wipe my face with the towel and deflect by asking, “Do I get to wear a cape?”

My humor catches everyone off guard, which is good because if things don’t lighten up we’re all going to be crushed. Becca snorts and James slips while laughing so his entire ass is stuck in the sink. And Greta. Well, Greta starts to cry a little as she smiles at me. She never did get my sense of humor.

6.3

I beat Ms. Finch to school Monday morning by a good fifteen minutes. I wait by my locker, which used to seem too close to her office, but now seems to be in a rather convenient location. Funny how that perspective thing works. Thanks for that one, Mrs. Dunwitty.

By the time Ms. Finch arrives, there are only a few minutes before the first bell for me to find out how Charlotte is doing. I shift foot to foot, as she approaches her door, jug o’ coffee in one hand, papers in the other, key ring clenched between her teeth.

“Need a hand?” I ask.

She grunts and releases her keys so they fall into my outstretched palm. “You do the honors,” she says, nodding toward her office door. “Be careful for falling objects. There have been a few of those lately.”

We both hold our breath as the lock releases with a click. I slowly open the door and brave the light switch, expecting at any moment to be electrocuted. Nothing. Everything looks normal, but man, what’s that smell?

Ms. Finch wrinkles her nose. “God. That is rotten. What is it?” She looks at me like I should know.

“I didn’t do anything. Wait here.” I take a deep breath and plunge into the small office. I open drawers, look under the desk, behind bookcases, in the trash, and behind a few of Charlotte’s paintings. Nothing. My lungs feel wrung out.

I dash back out and pant a few times, doubling over to rest my hands on my knees. My eyes are watering from the stench. I look at Ms. Finch and follow her gaze up to the ceiling tiles. Her face is pinched, studying them.

“I believe the prize is hidden behind the tile over my desk chair.”

She may be right. The tile is set back in place, but there is a chip in the front right corner, like maybe some jackhole was too clumsy while replacing it.

I nod at her and take one more big breath. I stand on her desk and slide the tile up and over. The hideous odor triples, making me gag. I’m going to have to stick my bare hand in there to find the source of the stink. I gag again.

I cover my mouth and nose with one hand to help block the fumes. With the other, I reach up and pat around in the ceiling until my fingers touch something smooth. It’s firm as long as I’m just brushing my fingers along it. But when I grasp it, my fingers sink up to my nail beds with a horrible squelching sound. In one fast movement, I grab whatever it is and pull it from the ceiling, like a decapitated rabbit out of a demented magician’s hat.

It’s a rotting fetal pig. The kind we dissect in freshman biology here. Someone must have taken it from the freezer on Friday and hid it here. The sight of it pisses me off. Ms. Finch shouldn’t have to put up with this. She’s trying to save her sister’s life. This is bullshit, and I’m stopping it here.

Ms. Finch, who had been leaning in the door to get a better view, gasps and jerks backward, stumbling into Brad Mitchell, the closest thing we have to a muscle-head at Brighton. He’s standing there glaring at me with his big old arms crossed over his big old chest. It’d be intimidating except I know that he cries like a baby if he gets anything less than an A on a test.

I hold the pig by its tail and jump off Ms. Finch’s desk. By some miracle of physics, I manage to stick the landing, wobbling so the pig circles like a pendulum from my grip. I march the wee piggie out into the hallway, the horrific stench of it preceding me.

“I believe I found your lab partner, Brad.”

He blinks at me, his arms still crossed, but a muscle near his eye begins to twitch.

“What’s all this?” Dr. Whiting’s voice comes booming down the hallway. I can see his slick, dark hair weaving through the far side of the crowd.

“This,” I say, waving the pig, “stops now. Got it, man?” Brad’s eyes are filling up, but he nods. “Get lost,” I say through clenched teeth. He hurls himself through the crowd, bowling over some girls.

I whirl around with the pig, trying to figure out what I’m going to do when a trashcan is thrust out at me. James’s thick forearm muscles flex as he shakes it in my face. Where’d he come from?

“Drop the pig, Chuck,” Greta’s says, her voice taut like a trip wire.

I toss the rotten meat into the trash and quickly snatch up the edges of the black bag to tie it shut. Now what? I look from James to Greta, but we’re out of time. Dr. Whiting strides up to us, his face puckering at the lingering odor.

“What’s going on here?” He crosses his arms over his sagging chest.

I can’t let anyone else go down for this. I started this revolution. I knew the risks. My mouth opens, but before I can say anything, Ms. Finch steps beside me.

“Oh, Mr. Hanson,” she says, her hands flapping the air near her eyes. “Thank you so much for helping me.”

Dr. Whiting’s thick brow twitches. “Ms. Finch?”

“When I came in my office this morning there was a horrible— Well, you can smell it, I’m sure. Mr. Hanson’s locker is right next door,” she says, pointing to my locker. “He could smell it, too.” Ms. Finch looks at me and I nod. Emphatically.

“He was the one that located the poor thing.” Ms. Finch breaks off, her hands flapping again, fanning away fake tears.

“What? What did you find?” he asks me, but Ms. Finch rushes to answer.

“A squirrel. A dead squirrel. It must have gotten in through a vent and couldn’t get out. Oh, I do hope he didn’t suffer long.”

Dr. Whiting’s muscles unclench. “Very well. Mr. Hanson, please deposit that trash bag in the large bin out back.”

I don’t say a word, afraid a full confession will fall out of my mouth instead of “yes, sir.” I turn on my heel and walk as quickly as I can down the hallway to the double doors at the end.

I toss the bag in the Dumpster and step away to take a few deep breaths. Ms. Finch just saved my butt. The kindness is overwhelming.

---

Ms. Finch is waiting for me at the doors when I come back. The clog in the hallway has been cleared, everyone moving off to first period. James and Greta are leaning against my locker. Greta holds out my backpack for me, but I just look at my hands, gross with pig gush and Dumpster gack. Ms. Finch leads us to the private teacher’s restroom down the hall.

“Wow,” James says with a whistle. “This is sweet.”

“It’s a bathroom, J.” Greta smacks his arm.

I head straight for the sinks, trying to ignore the fact that I have pork under my fingernails.

Ms. Finch leans against the wall next to me. “Thank you, Charlie.”

“I’m sorry about this,” I say, inspecting my sudsy hands. “These pranks have taken on a whole life of their own.”

“Frankenpranksters,” James whispers to Greta in his not-at-all-quiet whisper.

I’d tell him to shut up, but Greta stomps on his foot. Actions do speak louder than words.

I run hot water over the suds, scrubbing so hard my skin reddens. “It ends here. It’s gone too far.” I glance at Greta, who nods once. She’ll get the word out to everyone. As if she’s on her way to do it now, she takes James’s hand and tugs him out the door.

“I wouldn’t have gotten involved to begin with, but Charlotte said it would help her, and well…I’m hopeless when it comes to Charlotte.”

“I knew she was behind this.” I peek at Ms. Finch, expecting fury, but she’s got a weird smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “God. She’s infuriating.” Ms. Finch’s smile hitches higher, lighting her whole face. “That girl has been driving me crazy for years, but I can’t seem to stay mad. You’re not the only one who’ll do anything to make Charlotte happy.”

I grab a wad of paper towels. “How’s she doing?” I sniff experimentally at my fingers and flinch at the tinge of eau de rotten piggie still there.

“Fine. Charlotte’s just fine.”

“Define fine,” I say, turning the water on again.

Ms. Finch sighs. “She’s cantankerous, stubborn, and distant, same as she’s been all year. She’s fine.”

I feel horrible for Ms. Finch. She moved Charlotte here to be nearer to the university hospital and the clinical trial. I can see that clearly now. Those were the great opportunities Charlotte was talking about. But I’d have done the same thing in Ms. Finch’s shoes.

I rinse my hands again, watching the suds flow down the drain, swirling around the edge before they disappear.

“Can I see her?”

“I don’t know. Can you?” Ms. Finch’s expression is dull.

I cringe. “You sure she’s not your clone? Charlotte never lets me slide either. Only her face lights up whenever she gets to correct me.”

Ms. Finch’s eyes look hopeful. “Really?”

I nod, drying my hands a second time.

“I should be glad the version everyone else gets isn’t the same as the sullen girl I have to live with.”

“Maybe you’re getting the real deal because she trusts you. She knows she can be a pain in the a—uh, neck and you’ll still love her. It’s contractual, you know. Like with my sister, I can’t get rid of her even if she brings home best friends who drive me nuts.”

Ms. Finch smiles. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’ll write you a pass to class.”

I follow her back to her classroom and ignore the stares of the freshman wondering what is going on. Ms. Finch hands me two passes.

The top is my pass to class and the bottom reads, “Home resting today.”

I glance up at Ms. Finch. She shrugs. “You rarely win.”

My body vibrates with possibility. “But sometimes you do.”

I leave the classroom and turn right instead of left to leave by the double doors at the end of the hallway.

6.4

I am skipping school to go see a girl. Charles Mortimer Hanson is voluntarily missing biochemistry. The planet is suffering a cataclysmic pole shift, and life as I know it is over.

The apocalypse is pretty amazing.

When I ring the doorbell, the hellhound breaks into a throaty wail, the sound severing my frayed nerves. There’s no movement, though.

I walk around to the back and open the gate, scanning the yard for a few good pebbles to toss. Maybe I’ll get lucky and hit her window this time. I’m about to launch my first missile when a burst of gray with white fangs squeezes out of the dog door. For a second, I stare and wonder how something so massive could fit through such a small space. But it can, and it does, and then it comes charging at me with hackles raised.

I’m still holding the pebble and for an insane moment I believe I can defeat the dog, David and Goliath style, but before I release it, I hear an even more frightening growl.

“Hit my dog and die, Hanson.”

I freeze. Luckily, so does the dog. At the sound of Charlotte’s voice, it turns 180 degrees and runs toward her, all waggling tail and wiggly butt. Charlotte puts a hand down, resting it on the dog’s head as it collapses on its back haunches beside her. It grins at me like, Ha, ha, ha. Charlotte likes me best.

I drop my pebbles. “It was going to eat me.”

Charlotte smiles. “Naw. Just maim you a little.”

“Oh, well, good.” I shift my weight side to side and drop my gaze to the pebbles on the ground. I’m afraid to move closer to Charlotte. With the dog at her feet and the memory of her dwarfed by all that hospital equipment, my fight-or-flight instinct is in overdrive.

“What are you doing here?” Charlotte asks.

I look up at her and know that flight is not an option. “We didn’t finish our date. You said there would be a kiss at the end of it.”

Charlotte’s face flushes. “You still want to be with me, even after all that drama?”

I step toward her. “Yes.”

She smiles and shoos the dog in the house, motioning for me to follow. “No time like the present.”

We walk through the kitchen, which I’ve only seen through the doggie door, and into the living room. The walls are painted various shades of green and golden yellow, and every spare space is covered with bookshelves and art. The place smells nice, too. If a garden and a bakery got married, this scent would be their love child.

Covering one whole wall is an enormous canvas with a picture of a girl leaning against a barn door. The barn is old, like condemned old, so there are huge gaps in the wood and you can see straight through it. The girl’s face is turned, looking through one of the holes, watching the sun slip behind the horizon.

I know her. I can’t help myself, but my hand is reaching to touch the girl in the painting.

“It’s Jo.”

My hand falters. “What?”

“My sister. When she was younger than I am now.”

“I thought it was you.”

Charlotte’s eyes widen. She looks at the canvas again. “No. It’s Jo. I’m the barn.”

I look closer. “In the barn? I can’t see you.”

Charlotte’s light laugh seeps through my skin. “Not in the barn. I am. The barn.”

I step away from the painting. One light summer storm would knock that barn down.

I sit on the couch consumed by my racing pulse and a deep heat radiating from my chest. Charlotte curls up next to me, pulling an afghan over her legs. Her head rests on my shoulder, glossy black curls scenting the air I’m breathing.

“Can we—”

“Make out?” Charlotte attempts to finish my sentence, looking up at me with a crooked smile.

“Uh, I was going to say talk.”

Charlotte juts out her bottom lip. “Fine. I suppose you deserve some explanation.” She sits up and turns to face me on the couch. “What do you want to know?”

Now that she’s facing me and those blue eyes are fixed on me, the only thing I want to know is what it’d feel like to kiss her neck from her collarbone up to the soft space behind her ear.

“Seriously, I’m an open book, Charlie. Ask away.” She thinks I’m stalling because I’m afraid to ask the hard questions. So wrong.

“You are not an open book, unless that book is a mystery.”

She juts her chin out at me, growling in the back of her throat. I can’t take it anymore. I have to be closer. I lean in, drawing my lips up her neck, devouring the smell of vanilla. By the time I reach her ear, her growl has turned into a soft moan and all my insides go nuts. I’m cupping her head in one hand, so she can open her neck more to me, and this time, as I travel downward, I flick my tongue along the hollow above her collarbone.

Charlotte’s hands are in my hair, pulling my face to hers. Her lips crash into mine like a meteorite hitting Earth’s atmosphere. Fire and heat explode as we fall together toward an uncertain ground. It’s a long, beautiful fall.

Hearts thudding from impact, we finally pull apart, sharing the same breath. I want to live in this moment. I try not to see a spatial graph of the exact angle between our touching foreheads. I try to ignore the urge to count the exact seconds it would take to travel the distance from my personal space to hers. I try not to name the impressive variety of microorganisms living in the human mouth that we’ve just shared. I try to ignore the cool logic inside me that burns to ask her one question.

I must not try hard enough.

Charlotte’s lips quirk to one side. “Now we talk?”

When I nod with our foreheads still touching, her face moves with mine. She leans away, wrapping her fingers through the tassels at the edge of the afghan in her lap. “You sure you want to talk?” She winks at me when she says talk.

“No.”

Charlotte gives me a small smile and rests her head back on my shoulder. “There’s not much to say. I have cancer.”

“Are you fighting it? Can you win?”

Charlotte’s shoulders tense and slide upward. “When I was first diagnosed, there was never a question in my mind I’d beat it. Like it was a cold and I could take my medicine, lay around for a few days watching cartoons while everyone else went to school, and then, ta-dah! I’m cured.”

“But now?”

“The prognosis is bad, Charlie. Inoperable and metastasizing and bad. It’s going to keep coming back. This cancer is going to kill me either now or next year.”

“A year is a long time.”

“Is it?”

“Twelve months, fifty-two weeks, three hundred sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours—”

“Cute.”

“I’m just getting started. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, thirty-one million five hundred fifty-six thousand nine hundred twenty-six seconds…”

Charlotte is smiling up at me with a crooked grin. “That’s what I love about you. Always so literal.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I know this is hard to understand. It’s hard to explain. It’s not like I want to leave anyone behind.” She looks over at the painting of her broken body with the sun setting through her skin. “But, if I have to die, I’d like to do it with some hair on my head. Is that so horrible?”

“But you’ll be dead.”

“Yep.”

“It will bother you? Not having hair when you’re dead?”

“Dunno. But it bothers me now, when I’m alive. Shouldn’t that count for something?”

My heart does this jolting, squelching, shredding thing, and on the other side of the pain is a clear truth. “Yes. It counts,” I say and brush one of the curls away from her forehead. She catches my hand and gives it a squeeze.

“But why not just try the clinical trial?”

Charlotte’s body, warm and soft against me transforms into a glacier. She sits up, her face turning white, then red. The delicate lines of her jaw harden. “What did Jo tell you? It’s a miracle cure I’m refusing willy-nilly?”

“Willy-what? No.”

“Because it’s not. It’s horrible. I’ve done them before. Hell, one even worked for a while, which was awesome. But this one has an extremely low success rate.”

“But it’s a chance?”

“To be a guinea pig. I’m not a person the clinicians are trying to cure. I’m a vessel that contains what they need, cancer cells they can experiment with. I’ll be injected with poisons while they chart my reactions, looking for the exact dosage at which my entire body shuts down. As an added bonus, I’ll be one of the first humans ever to be injected with a man-made virus aimed at infecting and killing cancer cells.”

“That’s amazing.” I didn’t mean to speak, to say it out loud. Charlotte’s face becomes foreign, sculpted by anger and betrayal.

“Amazing for a few of the animals it didn’t kill.” She splutters out like a snuffed flame, her anger slipping away in wisps of smoke.

“How many survived?”

Charlotte tugs on a loose string in the afghan, her eyes as sharp as scalpels dissecting me. “Sixty percent.”

“That’s more than half.”

She scoffs. “Wow, you should go to, like, a math school or something.” The sarcasm in her voice is nothing compared to the disgust. She yanks on the string, wrapping it around two fingers now. “Forty percent of those animals died, Charlie.”

“But without it, your chance of dying is one hundred percent.”

“Same as everyone else.”

“Yeah, but Charlotte.” I can feel my desperation clawing its way up from my gut. “Without the clinical trial, you’ll die within a year.”

“Without it, I get to keep my memories.”

A jolt of adrenaline rushes out from my core, racing to my extremities and back again in less than a heartbeat. All of my senses are hyperaware. I can hear the click of the icemaker in the kitchen as it turns on. Charlotte’s perfume is warm like sugar cookies. And I can see the trembling of her curls as she fights to keep her body still, to keep her shoulders from heaving under the weight of heavy sobs.

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she snaps. “Jo didn’t tell you that part.”

She’s so angry, I know the probability of convincing her is low, but I have to keep trying. You rarely win. “But wouldn’t it be worth it—to be alive—if it worked. And think of the breakthrough in medicine that would be. A virus that attacks cancer would be monumental.”

Charlotte drags herself off the couch and looks down at me with her shoulders pinned back. “I am not a fucking science experiment.” Her voice cracks on the last word. “Life is not an experiment.” She runs from the room, wiping the tears from her face as they fall.

Subject: Charlotte Finch,

Method: Participate in super hot make out session. Follow up by suggesting girlfriend subject herself to scientific experimentation for the greater good,

Result: What do you think happened? Perhaps life should not be approached as a scientific endeavor, dumbass.

6.5

I pace the floor in front of the couch, replaying our conversation, hearing all the ways I screwed up. She was too angry to be rational, too emotional to be reasonable, too Charlotte—

Our brains rely on certain chemicals and proteins to manifest connections between different areas and tissues where memories are held. If the meds from the trial destroy those connections, the memories get either erased or stranded with no recall. Without her memories, Charlotte wouldn’t know me. What if I can’t get her to like me a second time? I’m still not sure how I did it this time.

Without her memories, Charlotte wouldn’t even know her own self, and if there is anything in this universe I can prove to be true, it’s that Charlotte Elizabeth Finch knows exactly who she is and what she wants. No one should be able to take that away.

I realize with horror that, had I won that argument, we both would have lost in the end.

The house is silent, and while I know Charlotte went to her room upstairs, I can’t hear her moving around. I can’t hear her crying.

My fingers ache now that my adrenaline has crashed, and as I climb the steps, my legs feel like I’ve just run a race. Everything about me feels worn down. There’s only one door closed upstairs. I lean against it.

“Charlotte? Please, let me in.”

At first there is no response, but then I hear her voice. “What’s stopping you?”

I try the doorknob and find it unlocked. The door doesn’t swing in like a bedroom door should. It opens out. Because it’s a freaking linen closet—a very well-organized linen closet, with labels and everything.

“Charlotte?”

“Down here.”

Her voice hadn’t come from behind the door at all. It’d come from behind me. I’d walked right past her room, so fixated on the closed door I incorrectly deduced was hers.

The linen closet was not Charlotte’s doing. Her room is messier than mine. There isn’t an inch of wall space to be seen through the sketches, posters, canvases, and overflowing bookcases covering them. And the floor is littered with more papers, pencils, open pots of paints, and clothes—lots and lots of clothes. It’s like all the chaos of the universe has come here to roost.

“Why is your door open?” I ask, stepping inside.

“Because I wanted you to find me.”

We watch each other from across the room.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you a question about that book you love so much.” I shift my weight, taking a step forward.

Charlotte’s eyes are searching mine. “What’s the question?”

“Do you think Atticus blamed himself for Tom?”

Charlotte’s intake of breath is sharp, and it feels like a dagger in my chest.

I fight to keep my voice strong. “For not being able to save the mockingbird? Could he ever forgive himself?”

Charlotte is nodding, her dark curls bobbing around her chin. She stretches out one hand, and I cross the room and sit before she can nod again. I clasp her hand, but it isn’t enough, so I pull her toward me, on top of me, curled on my lap with her head on my chest, and my arms around her.

From buried in the folds of my shirt, Charlotte says, “Things should be forgiven.” Her hand reaches up and touches my cheek, coaxing my face toward hers. “Just don’t forget.”

“Never.”

Charlotte fights to keep from crumbling. She draws her thumb back and forth over my cheekbone three times, before pulling my lips to hers.

---

We fell asleep, me stretched out on her bed with Charlotte curled into a ball at my side, her head resting on my shoulder. That’s how Ms. Finch finds us.

She wakes me with a hand on my free arm, shaking it gently. When I startle awake, she puts her finger to her lips to shush me. “Don’t wake Charley. She needs her sleep.” Her eyes soften as she looks over at her sister. They are hard stones when she focuses on me. “Don’t wake her, but definitely get the hell out of her bed.”

Дата добавления: 2014-12-24