A Matter of Life and Death or Something Read Online Free PDF Page A

memorized that it was five steps from the bent tree, heading away from the river, and one step sideways towards the house. I was breaking my own rules. I was breaking the rules that I thought the woods had. I looked up to the trees for advice, kind of, but they obviously said nothing. They just whooshed in the breeze. I decided that I would put it back where it had really come from, which was in the hands of whoever wrote it. Still. I was breaking the rules. I put my backpack on over my shoulders and it felt like it weighed a ton.
    â€œAaaaaaaarrrrrrrr-thurrrrrrrr!”
    â€œOOOOOOOHHHHHHH-KAAAYYY!”
    I went home and slid the book under my pillow and ate supper.

OTHER GALAXIES
    I REALLY did have Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t until the next day that I even thought about the notebook again. Simon and I had finished my school, and I was using the computer. I had just solved the hardest equation known to man, and I was proud of myself, so I celebrated with a cold glass of milk and a visit to www.rosiearoundtheworld.co.uk to see how Rosie was doing. Rosie is a woman whose husband died of cancer, and she’s running around the world because she knows that you only get one life and you have to grab it by its horns, and also because orphan kids need lots of money which she will raise for them. I’d found out about her about a year before when I was searching the internet for extraordinary people. She was about 80% finished her run around the world. I knew this because there was a picture on the site that showed the whole world and the line she was making around it, and I made a big drawing of it myself to keep track of her, with a star for where she started in Wales. Something about her really expired me. A lot of things about her did. I mean, she even ran through Siberia, for crying outside.
    Anyway, her website was updated every three days, on average, and I visited it just as often. It had lots of pictures of her all over the world—on the side of snowy highways, in the hot sun with sweat pouring off of her, smiling in front of famous statues, just her and Icebird. Icebird was the trailer that she pulled behind her everywhere she went because it kept everything she needed to survive inside of it, and sometimes I think she even slept in it.
    It was really crazy because on the website that day there was an update saying that she would actually be running through our town on April 19th, if everything went according to schedule. This was amazing news. I had been expecting that she might come somewhere nearby, but I mean I wasn’t expecting her to go through my exact town in a week. I went over to the National Geographic photo calendar on our fridge and wrote her name on the 19th. Even if she didn’t come exactly on that day, it was good to be prepared.
    It was right then, when I was staring at all the numbers on the calendar, that I finally remembered. The book! Simon was taking over the computer to do work stuff as I left the kitchen and walked through the living room and down the short hallway to my room. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about that book.
    I’d hid it under my pillow to keep it safe but then it was so well hidden that it had just fallen right out of my brain. My pillow felt kinda hard and flat with that thing under there. No wonder I had so many dreams. I took it out.
    It was exactly the same as I remembered it being, except I hadn’t remembered it. The black and white speckled cover, bulging and warped from the rain. The black ink running in places, all shaky. Hundreds of pages all stiff and brittle, crackly in the margins. The wire coil made of rust. The page numbers, the crossed out words.
    I spent a long time reading it. Basically, it seemed like a long story about a man named Phil, and also written by him. Only it was confusing because he didn’t always tell the story like a normal person, like saying “I did this and then I did this.” He did talk